This paper investigates price distortions in dual agent real estate transactions. Consistent with the literature, we find that dual agent has a null effect on sale price. However, dual agent distortions on sale price emerge after controlling for the ownership of the property. We find that dual...

The extent of competition in the real estate brokerage industry has been the subject of much debate among scholars, policy makers, and the popular press over the past few years. Critics have claimed that “traditional” full-service brokers have restricted competition from discount and...

This paper measures the effects of real estate brokerage services provided to sellers, other than MLS listings, on the terms and timing of home sales. It is not obvious that sellers benefit from those services. On the one hand, brokers offer potentially useful knowledge and expertise. On the...

Agents are often better informed than the clients who hire them and may exploit this informational advantage. Real-estate agents, who know much more about the housing market than the typical homeowner, are one example. Because real estate agents receive only a small share of the incremental...

This paper documents uniformity in real estate commission rates offered to buyers' agents using 653,475 residential listings in eastern Massachusetts from 1998–2011. Properties listed with lower commission rates experience less favorable transaction outcomes: they are 5 percent less likely to...

Real estate agents play an important intermediary role in housing markets. We use a merged transaction dataset that identifies houses purchased by registered real estate agents (salespersons) and other buyers in Singapore to empirically test the hypothesis that real estate agents use information...

Using a search-theoretical framework, we study how a home seller's choice of whether or not to use a broker depends on different market conditions. We analyze the role that the broker plays in the house-selling process by examining the expected time-to-transaction, the expected transaction...

This paper examines how seller pricing decision influence listing contract length and how these decision affect price and liquidity in housing markets. Because list price affects broker effort required to sell the property, brokers respond to seller overpricing by increasing the negotiated...

Online businesses have been surging worldwide during the past decade, especially during the recent COVID-19 epidemic. However, the market share of online real estate transactions is still limited, mainly due to the information-asymmetry problem. In this study, we manually collect data on online...

This paper analyzes how the competition among real estate brokers impacts housing prices in a typical sellers’ market in China. In a theoretical model, we discover a broker competition mechanism in which brokers compete for listings by promising higher transaction prices and compete for buyers...