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Seeing is Believing: The Impact of Buyers’ Onsite Viewing Activities on Housing Transactions

Buyers’ onsite viewing activities reveal important information about their housing demands, yet empirically we know little about their impact on transaction outcomes. Using a unique proprietary dataset which includes 4,397,652 onsite viewing records and 621,040 transaction outcomes from the largest real estate agency in China, we find that buyers who are more active in onsite viewings are associated with higher deal likelihood and high purchase prices in completed deals. Also, they tend to exceed their initial budgets and end up buying units with larger sizes and more rooms than their initial plan. Further, the impact of buyers’ onsite viewing activities on deal likelihood and overpayment is stronger in a thin market with fewer housing supplies. To establish causality, we exploit exogenous variations in onsite house viewings caused by national basketball games as attention distractions in our instrumental variable analysis, and find consistent results.