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Working Paper
The Good, the Bad, and the Ordinary: Estimating Agent Value-Added Using Real Estate Transactions
Despite the prevalence and high cost of real estate agents, there is limited empirical evidence as to the nature or efficacy of their services. In this paper we estimate real estate agents’ value-added when either selling or buying homes using data from three large multiple listing services (MLS). We find that homeowners who forgo a conventional real estate agent, but who list their homes on the MLS via a flat fee broker, sell for between 1 and 4 percent more before commission but take longer to sell and are less likely to complete a sale. However, these average effects mask a significant ...