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Michel Baudin

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Effects of Psychological Pricing in Real Estate – What does the data say?
Does “psychological pricing” work in real estate? Most commonly, it means pricing a home at, say, $799K instead of $800K, under the assumption that buyers only look at the left-most digit in a price, that the “lower” price will stimulate multiple offers and that, as a result, the property will sell faster for more money. A less common approach is to offer a unique price like, “$765,814” rather than any round number. It’s more memorable and suggests a price based on detailed study of the property’s features, and therefore not negotiable, whereas any price ending in “000” looks like an opening bid. Based on historical data on the San Francisco real estate market, we examine the following questions: To what extent is psychological pricing practiced by the industry? Does it actually make properties sell faster and, if so, how much faster? Does it drive the selling price up and, if so, by how much? The literature emphasizes the effect of break points on budgets and on-line searches. Upper and lower bounds in searches are tound numbers, and a round-number price should, in principle, make the listing appear in more searches. In the data, we can see the round prices versus prices with 9s, but we cannot measure the effect of excluding 4s from prices on Chinese or Japanese buyers, or of the number format used to present prices.