Itzhak Ben-David is a Ph.D. candidate in finance at the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business. (Levitt is one of his dissertation advisors.) While pursuing his original research idea — the degree to which housing prices efficiently incorporate anticipated tax increases — Ben-David stumbled upon a slightly juicier topic: a real-estate sleight of hand known as the “cashback transaction,” . . .
We’ve got a column appearing in the June 10 issue of the New York Times Magazine, which is a special issue on the U.S. wealth divide. Our piece deals with some interesting new research on real-estate sales (more on this later today). I know what you’re thinking: more Realtor bashing! Well, no. Even though we’ve written various things about the . . .
The economics of book publishing are usually not sensible, predictable, or even explicable. This New York Times article by Shira Boss is a good beginner’s guide to the subject. Not all real-estate agents are fond of the National Association of Realtors. This one calls the organization “routinely, habitually, congenitally anti-free market” as well as “a protection racket — vicious, awful, . . .
A while ago Levitt posed the question of whether the name of a street (such as “Pleasant Avenue” or “Massacre Lane”) could have an effect on the price of its real estate. Now, it turns out, there’s more data on the subject: The Edmonton Journal reports that a study by a Canadian real-estate analyst found a “a small but noteworthy . . .
Rarely does a reader express his sentiment so cogently as in this case, from one “Fred Peck”: Your article that tries to shed light on Realtors is probably the dumbest and most pointless thing I have ever read. Rogue economists, huh? You idiots sound more like cynical morons that think they know everything. I guess I’m the fool, though. You . . .
In research with Roland Fryer, later written up in Freakonomics, we asked the question “Does the name you give your child matter for her life outcome?” (I say “her” because we could only look at girls because the way we tried to answer the problem was by linking a baby girl’s birth certificate to the birth certificate of her child . . .
The Yale economist Robert Shiller has indexed American housing prices going back to 1890. You know how people like to say that such-and-such experience “was a real roller-coaster ride”? Well, the blogger Richard Hodge at SpeculativeBubble.com wanted to see if housing prices really were a roller-coaster ride. So he plotted Shiller’s inflation-adjusted index onto a roller-coaster video ride. It is . . .
In my research with Chad Syverson on real estate agents, which is also discussed in Freakonomics, we argue that the current system doesn’t do a great job of aligning the interests of the agent and the homeowner. Consequently, you may not want to believe what your real estate agent tells you. So how else are you going to figure out . . .
Although it is in a fairly primordial stage, this new home-finding tool from Google may turn out to be as formidable a challenge to Realtors as the Department of Justice. It does little more than aggregate public information (as is Google’s wont), but when the public information in question is the listings of homes for sale in any given city, . . .
Imagine that you are an editorial writer at a newspaper. In honor of the annual celebration of government transparency known as Sunshine Week, you decide to write a column that includes a link to a public-records database that lists names and addresses of all members of a certain population. Now, try to imagine which of the following databases might provoke . . .
Redfin is a discount real estate brokerage in Seattle that has put together some interesting data analysis from their first year in business. Their numbers suggest that clients who use their discount brokerage firm pay a lower percent of the list price than the typical home buyer in Seattle (99.329% of the listing price with Redfin vs. 100.233% with other . . .
A reader named Gerard Mulligan was good enough to let us know that a 1983 novel he was reading, Scenes From Later Life by William Cooper, contains a passage that, if the section from Freakonomics about real-estate agents were ever made into a film, could practically serve as the script. (If the film were British, that is.) Check out the . . .
I like to stop by the National Association of Realtors’ blog now and again to see what the N.A.R. is making of the many changes in real estate. A recent posting referred to a Harris Interactive poll from July in which people were asked to rate the prestige of various occupations. Firefighters were No. 1, while nurses, teachers, and military . . .
There have been many discussions on this blog, probably too many, about Realtors. (Click here or here or here, or, if you’re really twisted, just type “Realtor” in this page’s search box.) The gist? The National Association of Realtors has done a great job protecting its members but at the expense of allowing homesellers and buyers to enjoy a truly . . .
In the interest of not piling on, I was initially reluctant to mention this working paper, posted on the AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies website, about the flaws in the commission structure used by Realtors. Especially since its author, an attorney for the federal government named Mark S. Nadel, cites our book as well as a more recent article . . .
In New York City, at least, it sometimes seems that way. Not long ago, we wrote a column about how a real-estate boom actually lowers median Realtor income because of all the new agents who rush in to join the boom. Homethinking.com, a new website that allows customers to rate Realtors, has posted an interesting item on Realtor density. It . . .
I recently got an e-mail from someone who works for the Community Financial Services Association, the national trade group of payday lenders. She is unhappy that Congress wants to put a cap on the rates that payday lenders can charge. The proposed cap is 36% APR. If this legislation were passed, the CFSA woman writes, “Payday advance lenders could not . . .
I gave a speech at the PCBC builders conference earlier this week which Glenn Roberts, Jr. summarizes on the Inman News blog. (The link is to a subscription site, unfortunately. I could get to the article yesterday, but today it asks for a login.) In his article I am quoted as saying that the N.A.R. lawyers threatened to sue me. . . .
Nothing, except for the fact that I’m going to write about both of them here. A couple weeks ago, I posted about Thomas Robinson, an accounting professor at the University of Miami who, through ancestral DNA testing, had been deemed the first American to be able to genetically claim to be a descendant of Genghis Khan. Well, it turns out . . .
The National Association of Realtors has more than its fair share of adversaries, including the U.S. Department of Justice (which is suing the N.A.R. for anti-competitive practices) and the Consumer Federation of America (whose executive director recently told the N.Y. Times what he thinks of the N.A.R.: ”Because the industry functions as a cartel, it is able to overcharge consumers . . .
The National Association of Realtors has started a blog. The lead item today is headlined “The Cost of Selling without a REALTOR?: $31,800.” Pretty scary, huh? Here’s the lead: “Real estate professionals do more for sellers than make the transaction easier. They make them money. In fact, the average seller who uses a real estate professional makes 16 percent more . . .
Because we wrote this article, a lot of people are visiting this Web site to get our e-mail address to write in various comments. I’d suggest anyone who does so should feel free to post comments here so that everyone can see them.
If I were a Realtor, I might feel right about now that the entire free world has turned against me, having decided I’m a sharp-elbowed, greed-driven hustler trying to preserve an advantage that I don’t deserve. And I’d probably be right. In today’s New York Times is yet another chronicle of how the National Association of Realtors has used its . . .
As we wrote in Freakonomics, Realtors are incented to use proprietary information to the disadvantage of their customers. (Don’t be so smug: you probably would too if you were a Realtor.) The National Association of Realtors once yelled at us for discussing this situation on TV. Now the N.A.R. has a new and far more powerful enemy: the U.S. Department . . .
The answer is, that just like real estate agents and their clients, our incentives as authors are not perfectly aligned with the incentives of our publisher, William Morrow. As a consequence, we take actions that benefit ourselves and screw the publisher, just like real estate agents screw their clients. Every extra copy of Freakonomics that is sold earns the publishers . . .
In the Freakonomics chapter about real estate agents’ informational advantage, we discussed the different terms that agents use in want ads, and those terms’ correlation with higher or lower sales prices. Alas, there was one kind of information — whether or not a murder was committed in the house, for instance — that didn’t make the dataset. Here, however, from . . .
To “St. Cheryl,” who posted below about real-estate agents: what on earth did you mean about the sketchy practices of veterinarians? Please tell more, either here or by e-mail (levittdubner@freakonomics.com). Thanks.
I guess the National Association of Realtors was not so pleased with our latest visit to the Today show. The letter below is posted on the front page of their web site. I’ve taken the liberty of interspersing a few comments in italics. NAR Responds to Erroneous Statements Made on Today Show(June 17, 2005) — On June 16, guests on . . .
Levitt and Dubner revisited The Today Show on Thursday, June 16. Here’s a transcript: Copyright 2005 National Broadcasting Co. Inc. HEADLINE: Today’s Real Estate; Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitt ANCHORS: MATT LAUER MATT LAUER, co-host: This morning on TODAY’s REAL ESTATE, is your agent looking out for you when he or she sells your home? You might think your real . . .