The Real Estate Scientist Strikes Again: Pricing Your Home

This month’s issue of The Atlantic reports on research by Cornell University’s Manoj Thomas and his colleagues which found that consumers perceive round prices, such as $390,000, as being higher than prices such as $391,534. Round prices were in turn found to be correlated with a lower final sales price. Professor Thomas’s research, posted to the Web last week, validated findings first reported by Redfin in March 2007, based on an analysis of more than 30,000 2006 homes sales in Seattle , Washington. We would have included our March 2007 findings in our original Real Estate Scientist report, but worried that our data lacked a plausible rationale