Zeros Don’t Sell

The Week suggested that home sellers trying to grab buyers’ attention should avoid putting zeros in their sale prices. You don’t actually need to drop the price from $400,000 to $399,999 to make it seem cheaper.  In fact, you could even raise the price – to, say, $401,298 – and try to take advantage of the odd fact that people tend to subconsciously interpret precise numbers as being smaller than round ones.  Well-researched by cognitive scientists, this effect has also been documented in the real world.  One recent analysis of thousands of real estate transactions in South Florida and Long Island, NY, found that houses originally listed without zeros did indeed fetch higher final prices than those for which bidding started at a round number.