Social networking platforms like Facebook can not only get you more likes, it can also influence the price of your home if you intend to sell one, say researchers.
House prices rise can spread through social networks like a virus and your Facebook friends can have too much of an influence on what one pays for a house.
According to researchers from the US National Bureau of Economic Research, people whose friends are experiencing house price rises were willing to pay more for a house. The study, done by Facebook economist Michael Bailey, Harvard University’s Ruiqing Cao and Johannes Stroebel and Theresa Kuchler from New York University’s Stern School of Business, combined Facebook survey data with public record information on housing transactions.
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They looked at friends who were “geographically distant” and their social networks to find the effects, nzherald.co.nz reported. “If people’s far-off friends were from places where house prices rose by 5 per cent stronger than expected in the last two years, they were more likely to buy a house by 3.1 per cent, bought a house 1.7 per cent larger and paid 3.3 per cent more for a given house,” the report showed.