For many years, the late Lord Harold Samuel, a real estate tycoon in Great Britain, was credited with coining the expression, “There are three things that matter in property: location, location, location.”
In 2009, political pundit and linguist William Safire investigated this for the New York Times. His research brought him to Fred Shapiro, editor of “The Yale Book of Quotations,” who found a 1926 real estate classified ad in the Chicago Tribune: “Attention salesmen, sales managers: location, location, location, close to Rogers Park.” This means Lord Samuel would have had to have said this when he was just 14.