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Does Good Looking Realtor Earns More Commission?

Author

Listed:
  • Boon Ping Calvi Chua
  • Seow Eng Ong

Abstract

Discrimination is prevalent in the world. There are many pieces of research literature undertaken that studied the various forms of discrimination in the labour market. Discrimination occurs due to different reasons such as nationalities, skin colours, genders, performances, physically handicapped and looks. We used a unique dataset of over 1600 realtors working in two of the more established real estate agencies in Singapore to study whether beauty premium exists in this labour market. The study used commission data, from 2013 to 2016, the demographics, and photographs of all agents involved. We estimated the real estate agents’ look by applying golden ratio theory and a series of surveys conducted by the reviewers using the Likert scale. The study found that there was a compelling and negative correlation between beauty and commission. We further explore why beauty premium does not apply to this industry; we selected a smaller sample size of realtors, 93, and conducted a series of personality profiling tests to determine the traits that allowed them to perform well in the real estate industry. Our results showed that top realtors tend to display dominance, a little shy, higher educated, self-disciple and were more experience.

Suggested Citation

  • Boon Ping Calvi Chua & Seow Eng Ong, 2018. "Does Good Looking Realtor Earns More Commission?," ERES eres2018_305, European Real Estate Society (ERES).
    • Handle: RePEc:arz:wpaper:eres2018_305
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    More about this item

    Keywords

    beauty; commission; labour discrimination; real estate agency; Real Estate Agents;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • R3 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Real Estate Markets, Spatial Production Analysis, and Firm Location

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