The Strategic Role of Listing Price in Marketing Real Estate: Theory and Evidence

The seller of a real estate property and his broker have two primary goals: to sell the properly for as high a price as possible and as quickly as possible. While these are separate objectives, they are closely related through the listing price of the seller. The listing price affects how long it takes to find a buyer (i.e., Time On the Market = TOM), and TOM influences the price that results from the bargaining between the seller and the buyer. This leaves the seller and his agent with an important question: What is the optimal price to be asked for the property? The objective of this research is to provide a theoretical and empirical analysis of the impact of listing price on TOM and the transaction price.     

An Experimental Analysis of the Impact of Intermediaries on the Outcome of Bargaining Games

We conduct an experimental analysis of the bargaining between a buyer and a seller of the exchange of a single good by means of an intermediary or broker. We examine how an intermediary affects the price, the likelihood of a successful negotiation, and the time it takes to complete a negotiation. We first examine the impact of the intermediary as a pure middleman, and then as an information source about the distribution of seller and buyer reservation prices. The results show that an intermediary, whether or not informed, increases the sale price, reduces the likelihood of an agreement, and increases the time to reach an agreement (though the number of bargaining rounds declines). The results suggest that the benefits of brokerage may be predominantly in the matching of buyers and sellers rather than in facilitating bargaining.     

Real Estate Brokers, Nonprice Competition and the Housing Market

Given a fixed commission rate and easy entry, economic profits must be competed away on some nonprice margin in the real estate brokerage market. This paper focuses on nonprice competition in the level or quality of services offered buyers and sellers in the market, examining the equilibrium adjustment process, comparative static predictions and efficiency implications. In contrast with earlier studies focusing on wasteful advertising, this paper demonstrates that higher commission rates can either increase or decrease deadweight loss, depending upon how broker services affect buyer and seller transaction costs.     

Renegotiation of Listing Contracts, Seller Opportunism and Efficiency: An Economic Analysis

When a property owner engages a real estate broker to sell his or her property, the parties enter into a listing contract which entitles the broker to a commission if a ready, willing and able buyer is found before the contract expires. While a limit on the duration of the contract provides the broker with an incentive to work hard to find a buyer, it also creates the potential for seller opportunism. In particular, sellers have an incentive to renegotiate a lower commission as the end of the contract approaches. The paper concludes that, from an efficiency perspective, courts should generally enforce such renegotiations, given that transaction costs between brokers and sellers are ordinarily low.     

Entry deterrence: The case of a buyer with market power

The model considers a seller operating under the threat of an arbitrarily large number of unknown potential entrants and facing a strategic buyer. It is shown that the seller's Nash best response function slopes downward in price-output space, while that of the buyer slopes upward. The Nash equilibrium may be associated with a lower probability of entry than the equilibrium at which the buyer behaves non-strategically. With the buyer as the Stackelberg leader, the price is shown to decrease relative to that at the Nash equilibrium, but the probability of entry may rise or fall.     

Equilibrium of Housing and Real Estate Brokerage Markets Under Uncertainty

The purpose of this paper is to develop a model of the real estate brokerage and housing markets with imperfect information. The paper considers general equilibrium in these markets with and without a multiple listing service. Input prices are found to affect the equilibrium housing price, brokerage commission, and split factor. The introduction of a multiple listing service is found to have several important effects. The MLS causes housing value to increase, but its effect on the commission rate is indeterminate. Contrary to the results of another paper, MLS brokers, on average, will likely undertake more search for both buyers and listings than will a non-MLS broker. The primary reasons are related to the greater efficiency of search in the MLS context.     

Buyer power and exclusion in vertically related markets

Suppliers and consumer organizations have become increasingly concerned by the build-up of buyer power of retailers in many markets. A major concern is that strong retailers will abuse their power to exclude products and rival retailers from the market to be able to increase prices to consumers. As a consequence, remedies to limit buyer power are discussed and implemented in many countries. In this paper we compare the incentives for exclusion, and the effect on consumers prices, under both buyer and seller power. We study a model with a dominant upstream manufacturer and a competitive fringe of producers offering their products to two differentiated downstream retailers. We compare the equilibrium outcome of this model when i) the dominant supplier holds all the bargaining power, and (ii) the retailers have all the bargaining power. We show that full or partial exclusion of either the competitive product or downstream retailers occurs when inter and intrabrand competition are strong. This is true both under seller and buyer power. However, in contrast to the received literature, we find that buyer power weakly enhances welfare compared to seller power because buyer power will lead to both more product variety (less exclusion) and lower retail prices.     

Buyer Brokers: Do They Make a Difference? Their Influence on Selling Price and Search Duration

This study focuses on the role of buyer brokers in the home-buying process by examining the effects of brokerage representation on home selling prices and search duration. The results of this study indicate that real estate brokers, no matter the type, have no independent effect on home prices. The principal effect of broker intermediation is a reduction in buyer search time, compared to for-sale-by-owner transactions. The most important finding, however, is that buyer agents are more effective at reducing search time for their clients than more traditional seller agents or non-agent facilitators.     

The Multiple Listing Service, Commission Splits, and Broker Effort

This paper examines the impact of split commissions on broker effort in MLS sales. The joint effort of brokers to find a buyer for a given listing is maximized when the broker who locates a buyer first receives the entire commission. In contrast, splitting the commission between the listing and finding broker (when they differ) maximizes the joint profits of brokers. When competition among brokers to acquire listings is considered, however, the split brokers most prefer entails a smaller (though still positive) share for the listing broker in order to reduce wasteful competition for listings. While sellers still prefer to pay only the broker who finds a buyer, brokers may not be willing to acquire and share listings under such an arrangement.     

Optimal reserve prices in sealed-bid auctions with reference effects

The reference effect and loss aversion are incorporated into the buyer’s utility in the symmetric independent private value models of sealed-bid auctions. The buyer’s equilibrium bidding strategy and the seller’s optimal reserve price are derived for the first-price and second-price sealed-bid auctions. In both auction mechanisms, the seller’s optimal reserve price and expected revenue are increasing in the reference point. We compare the seller’s expected revenues as well as the optimal reserve prices in the two auctions. The results show that the seller will set a higher optimal reserve price but obtain lower optimal expected revenue in the second-price auction compared to the first-price auction. Further, we extend the model to the gain-seeking case, and endogenize the reference point as the ex-ante expected price of the item in equilibrium. In contrast to the loss-averse case, the seller will set a lower optimal reserve price but obtain higher optimal expected revenue in the second-price auction compared to the first-price auction if the buyers are gain-seeking. With an endogenous reference point, similar results are obtained in terms of revenue comparison between the two auctions.     

Why Do Vacant Houses Sell for Less: Holding Costs,Bargaining Power or Stigma?

This article introduces Nash bargaining into a search model to identify various channels through which vacancy affects selling price and liquidity in the resale market for houses. The model shows the various vacancy effects in the form of greater seller holding cost, lower seller bargaining power and unobserved negative attributes or stigma. We use a 20‐year data series on house transactions to test for these effects in a simultaneous model of price and liquidity, using the long data series to allow for variation across market phases. The robust vacancy effects on price and liquidity across all market phases primarily reflect greater seller holding cost and diminished bargaining power. Repeatedly, vacant houses also exhibit significant stigma effects in the rising market but not in stable or declining market phases. At the same time, vacant houses enjoy stronger shopping externality effects from surrounding houses for sale than do their occupied counterparts.     

Market Mechanism Choice and Real Estate Disposition: Search Versus Auction

We propose a model of mechanism choice in the disposition of real estate assets where we consider two alternatives: a search market and an auction. Within the search framework, we derive an equilibrium whereby buyers incur search costs and sellers incur holding costs for the period during which the property is not sold. In the auction alternative, the seller joins an existing pool of sellers in undertaking a multiple–object auction and pays a commission upon sale. Buyers and sellers freely choose their mechanisms, which in equilibrium are optimal given each group's conjectures about the mechanism choice of their counterpart. In equilibrium, an agent cannot benefit from deviating from his choice and each agent's beliefs are consistent with the equilibrium outcome. It is shown that (a) buyers with high search costs will choose auctions because the auction payoff imposes an upper bound on buyers' gains from search, and (b) prices at auctions will be higher. Using vacant lot sales data and a method–of–moment estimator which accounts for the presence of an endogenous discrete mechanism choice variable, we estimated a hedonic regression to detect the price effect. It was determined that, on average, lots sold for $1.44 per square foot more in auctions than in the search market, as predicted by our model.     

Contracts as a barrier to entry: Impact of Buyer’s asymmetric information and bargaining power

An incumbent seller contracts with a buyer under the threat of entry. The contract stipulates a price and a penalty for breach if the buyer later switches to the entrant. Sellers are heterogenous in terms of the gross surplus they provide to the buyer. The buyer is privately informed on her valuation for the incumbent’s service. Asymmetric information makes the incumbent favor entry as it helps screening buyers. When the entrant has some bargaining power vis-à-vis the buyer and keeps a share of the gains from entry, the incumbent instead wants to reduce entry. The compounding effect of these two forces may lead to either excessive entry or foreclosure, and possibly to a fixed rebate for exclusivity which is afforded to all buyers.     

Bilateral Bargaining with Externalities

This paper provides an analysis of a non‐cooperative pairwise bargaining game between agents in a network. We establish that there exists an equilibrium that generates a coalitional bargaining division of the reduced surplus that arises as a result of externalities between agents. That is, we provide a non‐cooperative justification for a cooperative division of a non‐cooperative surplus. The resulting division is related to the Myerson‐Shapley value with properties that are particularly useful and tractable in applications. We demonstrate this by examining buyer‐seller networks and vertical foreclosure.     

Estimating Bargaining Effects in Hedonic Models: Evidence from the Housing Market

Bargaining is common in markets for heterogeneous goods and differences in bargaining power between buyer and seller affect the negotiated transaction price. Previous research has found systematic evidence in the housing markets that weak buyers pay higher prices and weak sellers receive lower prices for their homes. Earlier work has modeled the bargaining effect as a parallel shift in the hedonic function, implicitly assuming that attribute shadow prices were unaffected by the bargaining process. In this paper, we use a sample of home sales where the seller's bargaining power is weakened by the fact that the home is vacant at the time of sale to test whether the effect of bargaining is best captured by a shift in the hedonic constant or whether the attribute shadow prices vary as well. The question is significant for property valuation where estimation of the marginal value of an attribute is commonly used to adjust comparable sales data. We find strong confirmation that bargaining power influences the negotiated price. We also find evidence that bargaining power alters attribute prices, although we do not find a consistent pattern across markets.     

The Housing Market and Real Estate Brokers

The major development in this paper concerns the failure, in earlier studies, to consider interaction between alternative methods of arranging sales in the housing market. A seller may market a house by direct negotiations with buyers, without the intermediation of real estate brokers, or by listing the house with a broker. A rational seller would choose the option which offers the higher expected return on the house. In a sequence of models we argue that the seller's option of a method of sale induces competitive pressure in the choice of the commission rate by the broker. We also consider the split rate in a multiple listing system, ease of entry of brokers and the cartel hypothesis as applied to brokers. We conclude that the competitive pressure of direct negotiations between sellers and buyers, relative free entry of brokers and the inappropri-ateness of the cartel hypothesis cast serious doubt about a general consensus of opinion that the brokerage system is characterized by price fixing, excessive commissions and excessive marketing costs.     

Exclusionary discounts

We consider a two-period model with two sellers and one buyer. Although we assume it is efficient for the buyer to purchase from both sellers in each period, we show that when the buyer's valuations are inter-temporally linked and at least one seller is financially constrained, exclusion can sometimes arise in equilibrium (i.e., the buyer purchases all of its requirements from the same seller in each period). The exclusionary equilibria are supported by contract offers in which the excluding seller's incremental price to supply the contestable part of demand is below its marginal cost and sometimes negative. Our findings contribute to the literatures on market-share contracts, bundling, all-units discounts, and loyalty discounts.     

Price Dispersion and Price Discrimination: Empirical Evidence from a Spot Market for Water

This note shows the existence of price dispersion and pricediscrimination in a spot market for water.Several behaviors contributing to this dispersion/discrimination arefound for both the seller and buyer in this relatively competitive market,and examples are given of each. Using some previous theoretical work,the common thread linking the differing behaviors is shown to bediffering levels of information and search costs.     

Warranty,Seller Reputation,and Buyer Experience: Evidence From EBAY Used Car Auctions

Using data from the eBay car auction market, we test several predictions regarding warranties, seller reputation and buyer experience in the determination of the final price. We find that the presence of a warranty generates a price premium, but that its magnitude decreases when the seller has a more established reputation. Compared to private sellers, professional dealers, who are ‘repeated‐game players’ in the market, benefit less from a warranty and its substitutability for seller reputation is relatively small. In addition, a buyer with greater experience tends to pay less for a warranty or for a professional dealership.     

Search, Bargaining and Optimal Asking Prices

This paper analyzes a search-and-bargaining model in which the asking price influences the rate at which potential customers arrive to inspect the seller's house, and the buyer's valuation of the asset is not learned until after the seller makes his initial offer (the asking price). The optimal asking and reservation prices are characterized, and the existence of a subgame-perfect equilibrium asking-price—reservation-price strategy is established. Comparative-statics analysis illustrates how seller and buyer discount rates and the buyer's outside opportunity affect the optimal reservation and asking prices.