So how about that Zimmerman trial?

[Daldolma]

Originally Posted by Alawen [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Buyers rarely interact directly with sellers. There is usually at least one agent involved and frequently two.

Let's imagine for a moment that Bob opens up Bob's Pretty Good Black and Latino Loan Store. Bob starts making enough loans to show up on the radar of First National Loan Gougers of Omaha. They crunch the numbers and they'll make more money by buying Bob out. They don't even have to pull in favors from Mayor Corruption or Governor How Much You Got. Bob gets a couple mil, First National goes back to gouging. No conspiracy required.

Barkingturtle, I'm pretty stubborn. Not as stubborn as HBB, but I'll waste quite a bit of time before I realize the futility of something. But what if even one person says, "Hey, I hadn't looked at it that way?"

from the abstract that was posted, the 3% premium seems to be related to purchase price, not loan rates. i'd quibble with your suggestion that buyers/sellers rarely interact, but even granting that most transactions are driven by agents, you're suggesting small-scale actors as diverse as real estate agents are summarily and invariably hiking prices on minority buyers by 3% in all markets. that just doesn't strike me as a tenable interpretation of the data -- it's more of a shifting of the goal posts. the study found no differences based on race of seller or racial composition of neighborhood. you're shrugging off those measures and doubling down on the race of the real estate agent(s), which went unrecorded.

i won't venture a guess as to those numbers, but assuming real estate agents were to fall in line with the people they're representing or the neighborhood(s) they are active in, you'd be back to looking at the buyers