(What) do top performing real estate agents deliver for their clients?

Existing evidence indicates that larger listing inventories thin agent effort dedicated to each individual client. This study examines whether shopping externalities or other scale effects offset this inventory externality for agents with the largest market presence. Data from Central Virginia shows that agents holding the greatest percentage of listings in the housing market obtain higher prices and sell listing faster than other agents. This pattern is consistent with the notion that top tier listing agents are able to exploit their market presence to generate meaningful positive shopping externality effects for individual clients. Propensity scoring models provide evidence that the performance advantage of these agents is not driven by differences in the types of houses they represent, but reflects agent productivity. On the other hand, top tier agents in terms of sales do not consistently obtain higher prices or shorter selling times for their listing clients. The shopping externalities associated with top tier listing agents do not appear to extend to top tier selling agents.