Management Science and Information Systems' Seminar（2017-15）

Topic:How Online Information Influences Offline Transactions: The Case of Zillow and the Real Estate Market

Speaker:Zhengrui Jiang,Iowa State University

Time:Wednesday, December 20th, 10:00--11:30

Place:Room 217, Guanghua Building 2

Abstract:

Internet-enabled platforms are having a profound impact on how information flows and how transactions are conducted in the business world; the real estate market is no exception. Using data collected from Zillow.com, the most dominant digital real-estate platform, we study how online property information affects offline property transactions. Our results show that information on properties’experienceattributes has a more significant impact on offline property transactions than does information onsearchattributes. More specifically, the length of textual property description and the number of photos are shown to have a positive influence on offline property sale price. The amount of structured property information such as facts and figures, on the other hand, has no significant influence on sale price. In addition, our results reveal that online property information has a larger influence on the sale price ofuncommonproperties than on that ofcommonproperties. Furthermore, we find that thesave-per-view ratio, i.e., the proportion of online viewers who have saved a property, has a larger positive impact on the sale price of uncommon properties than on that of common properties. These findings shed light on how online property information is used by home buyers and sellers for different types of properties; such insights can help real estate professionals better utilize digital platforms to facilitate property transactions, and assist platform owners improve their platform design and the provision of online property information.

Introduction:

Zhengrui Jiang is theThome Professor in Business and associate professor of information systems at the College of Business, Iowa State University.He received his PhD in Management Science/Information Systems from the University of Texas at Dallas. His primary research interests includebusiness intelligence/analytics, data quality and database management, diffusion of technological innovations, and economics of information goods. He has published in leading academic journals includingMIS Quarterly,Information Systems Research,Management Science,IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering,INRORMS Journal on Computing, andJournal of Management Information Systems. He currently serves as an associate editor forMIS Quarterly, and won the journal’s Outstanding Associate Editor Award in 2016. Starting from January 2018, he will be serving as an associate editor forInformation Systems Research. In the past few years, he has also served as a program co-chair for the 2014Midwest Association of Information Systems Conferenceand the 2015Big XII+ MIS Research Symposium. He will be co-chairing the 2018Workshop on Information Technology and Systems.

Your participation is warmly welcomed!