If Johnny Depp or Angelina Jolie change careers and walk into your home to pitch their skills at selling real estate, sign ’em up immediately.
It turns out that looks matter.
Even after controlling for the quality of the house, research published in Applied Financial Economics finds that the personal characteristics of real estate agents affect house prices but don’t shorten the length of time a property is on the market.
So reports Marina Adshade in a post on bigthink.com.
She quotes researchers Sean P. Salter, Franklin G. Mixon Jr. and Ernest W. King, whose paper on “Broker beauty and boon: a study of physical attractiveness and its effect on real estate brokers’ income and productivity” was published in March. Notes the blogger:
In their analysis the researchers control for age of the property, size of the house, number of bedrooms, number of bathrooms, location of the home and, as controls for quality, whether or not the house has hardwood flooring, brick siding and granite countertops.
Having either an attractive listing agent or selling agent boosts the contract price, but attractive listing agents have twice as much of an effect.
The study also shows that women outperform men in terms of price as do white agents in comparison with those who are non-white.
According to the authors, it is not the beauty of the agents that produces higher prices. They theorize it is their beauty that enables those agents to woo the sellers of properties that are more expensive than others.
I haven’t been able to unearth the research itself, so I don’t really have a fix on how much stock to put in it.
But I think it’s high time I had a manicure, haircut and appointment with a plastic surgeon. You know, just to be safe.
Tomorrow: Lookin’ smart, not just good
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Malcolm Carter
Licensed Associate Real Estate Broker
Senior Vice President
Charles Rutenberg Realty
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