Abstract:  We examine home sales in a number of North American cities. Despite the high stakes, sellers often list their properties at “odd prices”—prices just below round numbers, such as $499,800. While this strategy is known to increase demand for low-ticket consumer goods, it backfires in housing markets: odd-priced homes are 4 percentage points less likely to sell, sell for 0.7% less, and stay on the market 7 days longer than their round-priced counterparts. These effects are robust across cities, price thresholds, and years, and cannot be explained as a spurious correlation. Rather, odd-priced houses appear to underperform because they attract fewer, lower willingness-to-pay buyers, and face more competition than round-priced houses. 

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