Intra-firm Real Estate Brokerage Compensation Choices and Agent Performance

This paper seeks to empirically determine whether more skilled and productive real estate salespeople, identified as full-payout or 100% commission agents, have a discernable, systematic effect on property selling price and its marketing time. Two types of agents, 100%ers and split-commission agents, are identified and controlled for in hedonic pricing and duration models in order to examine the relationship between incentives and agent performance. The results reveal that 100% agents sell their listed properties faster and at premiums. This paper may also help explain the contradictory findings of earlier research.