Vision-based real estate price estimation

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

Since the advent of online real estate database companies like Zillow, Trulia and Redfin, the problem of automatic estimation of market values for houses has received considerable attention. Several real estate websites provide such estimates using a proprietary formula. Although these estimates are often close to the actual sale prices, in some cases they are highly inaccurate. One of the key factors that affects the value of a house is its interior and exterior appearance, which is not considered in calculating automatic value estimates. In this paper, we evaluate the impact of visual characteristics of a house on its market value. Using deep convolutional neural networks on a large dataset of photos of home interiors and exteriors, we develop a method for estimating the luxury level of real estate photos. We also develop a novel framework for automated value assessment using the above photos in addition to home characteristics including size, offered price and number of bedrooms. Finally, by applying our proposed method for price estimation to a new dataset of real estate photos and metadata, we show that it outperforms Zillow’s estimates.

Original languageEnglish
JournalMachine Vision and Applications
Volume29
Issue number4
Pages (from-to)667-676
Number of pages10
ISSN0932-8092
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 May 2018
Externally publishedYes

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2018, Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.

    Research areas

  • Automated valuation method, Computer vision, Convolutional neural networks, Crowdsourcing, Real estate

ID: 301826358