Real Estate Brokers: Do they inflate housing prices? - CEREG

This paper constitutes a primary study on the impact of real estate brokers on housing prices.Even though there is evidence that brokers affect the price of houses they sell, themethodology is incomplete due to a limited time access to the database. A Heckman twostagemodel (1979) should be performed. The first stage, undertaken to determine whetherselection bias is present in the selling prices, consists of modeling the decision to choose areal estate broker and produces the inverse Mills ratio. In the second stage the selling priceequation is estimated using an OLS regression, including the inverse Mills that controls forselection bias effects. So, the next step will be to complete the methodology of the study. Itwould also be interesting to extend the study to other European countries and to consider alarger period of study.26