Conflicts of Interest and the Realtor Commission Puzzle

Panle Barwick (), Parag Pathak and Maisy Wong

No 21489, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: This paper documents uniformity in real estate commission rates across markets and time using a dataset on realtor commissions for 653,475 residential listings in eastern Massachusetts from 1998-2011. Newly established real estate brokerage offices charging low commissions grow more slowly than comparable entrants with higher commissions. Properties listed with lower commission rates experience less favorable transaction outcomes: they are 5% less likely to sell and take 12% longer to sell. These adverse outcomes reflect decreased willingness of buyers' agents to intermediate low commission properties (steering) rather than heterogeneous seller preferences or reduced effort of listing agents. While all agents and offices prefer properties with high commissions, firms and agents with large market shares purchase a disproportionately small fraction of low commission properties. The negative outcomes for low commissions provide empirical support for regulatory concerns that steering reinforces the uniformity of commissions.

JEL-codes: D4 L1 L8 R2 R3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ger and nep-ure
Note: IO LE
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published as Barwick, Panle Jia, Parag A. Pathak, and Maisy Wong. 2017. "Conflicts of Interest and Steering in Residential Brokerage." American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, 9 (3): 191-222. DOI: 10.1257/app.20160214

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w21489.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:21489

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w21489

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().