Home warranties are often criticized for their lack of worth to a potential home buyer. We argue that both home buyers and home sellers may benefit from warranties, though the benefits are very small. If home buyers are risk averse, home warranties provide a valuable form of insurance. Sellers...

We examine commission splits between listing and selling agents in real estate transactions. We construct a theoretical model to show that agency problems arise when a listing agent attempts to maximize his or her payoff while setting the commission split. Mitigation to these agency problems can...

This study is the first to examine the principal-agent issues surrounding how agents' efforts to sell their own properties affect their efforts to sell concurrently listed client properties. The principal-agent model shows that listed agent-owned properties induce agents to worker harder over...

This research examines the productivity of real estate agents who acquire and maintain their real estate salesperson’s license for two years or less (ROOKIE) relative to more experienced agents who have been licensed agents for 10 years or more (VETERAN). Many individuals pursue a real estate...

We examine neighborhood externalities that arise from the perceived risk associated with the proximity of a registered sex offender’s residence. We find large negative externality effects on a property’s price and liquidity, employing empirical techniques that include a fixed-effects OLS...

Miceli (1989) in a search for the optimal time to allow a broker to market property provides a theoretical model which posits that the principal (seller) may use the length of the listing contract to motivate the agent (listing broker) to better align incentives. Expanding slightly on Miceli,...

This work empirically investigates the effect of the amount of time provided the broker to market property (listing contract length) on the likelihood of a successful marketing attempt. Do shorter listing contracts increase broker motivation or can contracts be so short that marketing efforts...