Agent Intermediation and Racial Price Differences

Most housing transactions are brokered wherein the buyer and seller do not meet in person. In which case the buyer’s race is not revealed to the seller, so the seller cannot discriminate based on race. Despite this observation, previous studies find racial price differentials based on the race of the buyer. We provide evidence that these estimates suffer from an omitted variable bias attributable to the time-varying attributes of the house. After controlling for the time-varying attributes of the house, we find that minority (black and Hispanic) and non-minority (white) buyers pay a similar price for comparable housing. We also examine whether agent intermediation provides a channel through which differential treatment can occur. We find no evidence of racial price differentials at the agent level