A research study by Zillow shows that the number of visits or page views to a luxury home has no effect on how fast it gets sold in the market.
In a report in Wall Street Journal, the 50 luxury homes listed in Zillow that got the most traffic spent around 133 days before getting sold. In contrast, the rest of the $3 million-plus homes which has a measly median of 552 page views were sold in a median of 129 days. That is approximately 5 days faster than the high-traffic luxury homes.
Skylar Olsen, Zillow senior economist said that while luxury listings get lots of clicks, "the ratio of signal to noise is much higher."
In the study, the most-viewed luxury home located in Bridgehampton, N.Y. , which garnered 11,295 views in a month was sold for $27.5 million after 231 days on Zillow.
In fact, a luxury home in Lost Altos Hills, California which is fifth overall in terms of page views with 7157 was the last to be sold in the sample data used. It was sold for $25 million after 596 days in Zillow listing.
Meanwhile, a home in San Francisco with only 3695 views was immediately sold after only 14 days.
Moreover, the home which stayed in the Zillow list the most around 437 days had a modest number of page views of 4068 hits.
The great majority of luxury homes on the list were located California.
The cost of the house may be a factor to the length of days it spends in the Zillow listing before getting sold.
Ironically though, the most expensive house in the sample data used was sold only after 24 days for $45 million and 5439 views. Meanwhile the cheapest house in the sample sold for $2.9 million stayed in the list for 47 days.
In another report in Builderonline, Ms. Olsen further surmise the results of the study may also be attributed to two points. One is expensive, competitive housing markets and second, Zillow users might be more inclined to browse mansion-like homes.
