Published In

The Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

6-30-2022

Subjects

Real property, Consumer behavior, Confirmatory factor analysis

Abstract

Virtual tours such as pre-recorded videos or self-guided virtual reality (VR) tours represent marketing strategies that agents can use to promote homes for sale. Assuming agents aim at maximizing their net commissions, we expect virtual tours, which require more agent effort and are more costly, to be used for homes that are difficult to show due to being owner- or tenant-occupied. Using 34,359 single-family transactions from multiple US markets, we show that virtual tours impact the sales prices of occupied homes (1) directly (main effect) and (2) indirectly through an interaction with time on market (TOM). However, this impact differs in directionality and size across price segments and occupier type. The use of virtual tours has no effect on the sales prices of vacant homes. Our results suggest that virtual tours are effective strategies to overcome the difficulty of showing homes and moderate the price-TOM relation.

Rights

Copyright (c) 2022 The Authors

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

DOI

10.1007/s11146-022-09908-x

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/38163

Download

Included in

Real Estate Commons

Share

COinS