The Impact of Public Information on Housing Market Decisions: Evidence from Third-Party AVMs

The role of publicly available information in the price discovery of stock and bond markets has been extensively examined, while the study of its role in the residential real estate market has been scant. Supported by a theoretical framework and using a novel dataset from a third-party data provider and Automated Valuation Model (AVM) appraiser, Zillow, we show that public information available at the time of initial listing (as opposed to relying on ex-post realized transaction price) can help explain selling price, time-on-market, as well as the probability of listing price revisions.