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Sexy Real Estate Agents Get Higher Prices

By Mike Wheatley | April 17, 2012

If you want to get the best possible price for your home, then you need to hire a good-looking realtor. However, if you want to sell faster and don’t care so much about the price, an unattractive sales rep is much more desirable.

Sexy real estate agents can tempt a much higher price, says a new study © Luis Louro - Fotolia.com

Controversial opinions for sure, but nevertheless these are the findings of a recently published study in the Applied Financial Economics Journal.

The study, which goes by the impressively long title - “Broker Beauty and Boon: A Study of Physical Attractiveness and its Effects on Real Estate Brokers’ Income and Productivity” – found that real estate agents who are considered ‘physically attractive’ tend to sell homes at much higher prices than ‘less attractive’ agents do, on both the selling and the listing side. Researchers noted that ‘good looks’ seem to be twice as effective on the listing side when compared to the selling side.

Beauty of course, can be a very subjective thing – and so the authors of the study carried out a survey in order to rate the attractiveness of agents taking part in the study, before combining this information with their analysis of MLS data.

Interestingly, a real estate agent’s attractiveness doesn’t seem to have much bearing on how long the property is listed for sale. The study reports that pretty agents actually sell fewer homes than unattractive agents, something that suggests that while a good-looking agent is able to sell his or her listing for more, they are unlikely to earn more money for themselves.

The authors of the report came to the conclusion that attractive agents aren’t using their looks to sell properties, rather they just seem to be better at attracting listings that can be sold for better prices:

“Results suggest beauty augments more attractive agents’ wages and that more attractive agents use beauty to supplement classic production-related characteristics, such as effort, intelligence, and organizational skills,”

Source: Big Think

Mike Wheatley is the senior editor at Realty Biz News. Got a real estate related news article you wish to share, contact Mike at [email protected].
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