Days on market and home sales

In 2006, Massachusetts adopted a new policy that prohibits home sellers from resetting their properties’ days on market through relisting. Massachusetts homes exposed to the policy change experienced a $16,000 reduction in sale price relative to Rhode Island homes. Slow-moving homes suffered a great...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Tucker, Catherine Elizabeth, Zhang, Juanjuan, Zhu, Ting
Other Authors: Sloan School of Management
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: John Wiley & Sons, Inc 2014
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/88161
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1635-3797
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1847-4832
Description
Summary:In 2006, Massachusetts adopted a new policy that prohibits home sellers from resetting their properties’ days on market through relisting. Massachusetts homes exposed to the policy change experienced a $16,000 reduction in sale price relative to Rhode Island homes. Slow-moving homes suffered a greater reduction, but newer listings only had a small increase in sale price. One reason is that some buyers were unaware of sellers’ manipulation of days on market and thus unable to recognize authentically new listings. Sellers reacted to the new policy by cutting listing prices, although in towns where listing price history was transparent, sellers raised listing prices to dampen the stigma of slow sales.