October 23th, 2026
Connect or Clique: The Role of Agent Networks in the Housing Market
(Ruiqi Wang, NUS, Economics, Industrial Organization)
Online real estate platforms make property listings widely accessible, yet buyers’ effective search opportunities may still be shaped by agents’ informal collaboration networks. Using detailed records of online browsing, offline property showings, and transactions in the Beijing housing market, we recover agents’ collaboration networks from their historical interactions using an unsupervised machine learning method. We find that after contacting an agent, buyers shift their online search toward locations with greater coverage by their agent’s network, and network-linked properties are more likely to receive offline visits, even conditional on prior awareness and local market characteristics. We develop and estimate a structural model of buyer awareness, search and purchase that distinguishes two channels through which agent networks operate: shaping which listings buyers become aware of, and steering which known listings they visit. Counterfactuals separately eliminate network-based advantages in information exposure and offline visit recommendations to quantify their effects on search depth, match quality and buyer welfare.
October 30th, 2026
TBD
(Liaoliang Zhang, NUS, Economics, TBD)
TBD
November 13th, 2026
TBD
(Nuo Lei, NUS, Economics, Development Economics)
TBD