Brokering Sales

This chapter examines how real estate brokerage routines pressured agents to use the racist market rubric in their work and how brokerages’ silence about unofficial yet potentially discriminatory routines served as a form of approval for agents adopting these routines. When agents interpreted established brokerage routines through the racist market rubric, they cultivated relationships with White individuals and excluded Asian, Black, and Latinx individuals. At times, brokerage routines—such as the automated use of the local real estate board’s market area map—required agents to advertise homes according to a racial–spatial hierarchy. In addition, brokerages remained silent when White agents pursued alternate routines outside the bounds of brokerage organizations, such as when they took on pocket listings—that is, homes not advertised on the Multiple Listing Service. Given the racial patterns of real estate networking in Houston, White home buyers had disproportionate access to pocket listings, yet White agents faced no verbal, professional, or legal sanctions for adopting this behavior.

International Real Estate Review

This paper considers the information content of Multiple Listing Service (MLS) descriptions and employs a significantly larger data set than previous studies. The analysis first catalogs the most frequently used terms by real estate agents in MLS descriptions. Using hedonic modeling, we estimate the effect of this qualitative information on transaction price and days on the market. Finally, we extend earlier empirical work by utilizing our larger MLS data set to forecast the probability that a house will sell after it is listed. This last contribution further sheds light on the role of qualitative information to infer property condition or circumstances that surround the sale of the property.

The Relative Performance of Real Estate Marketing Platforms: MLS versus FSBOMadison.com

We compare house sales on a For-Sale-By-Owner (FSBO) platform to Multiple Listing Service (MLS) sales and find that FSBO precommission prices are no lower, but that FSBO is less effective in terms of time to sell and probability of a sale. We do not find direct evidence of the importance of network size as a reason for the lower effectiveness of FSBO. We do find evidence of endogenous platform differentiation: patient sellers use FSBO while patient buyers transact more often on the MLS (where they avoid patient sellers). We discuss the implications for platform competition, two-sided markets, and welfare. (JEL L85, M31, R31)

INCREASING EFFICIENCY OF MULTIPLE LISTING SERVICE SYSTEMS APPLYING WEB‐BASED DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM FOR REAL ESTATE

One of the major problems in Multiple Listing Service Systems is to find what you want. Number of real estate alternatives on the Internet is thousands. How can customers find the rational alternative on the Internet? Once real estate is found, the customer usually wants to compare alternatives. There are five types of aids to comparison shopping: search on hypertext files by agents, search alternatives on databases, alternative search and tabular comparison, comparison of alternative products and services from multiple malls, search and multiple criteria decision‐making. Therefore, the efficiency of Multiple Listing Service Systems may be increased by applying multiple criteria decision support systems developed by authors. The authors have developed Web‐based Decision Support System for Real Estate (DSS‐RE). Proposed DSS‐RE can create value in next important ways: help customers assess their needs, identify suitable real estate to fulfil needs, compare and evaluate real estate, help customers evaluate the usefulness of the real estate in the after‐purchase evaluation stage, etc.