Vision-based Real Estate Price Estimation
This addresses the issue of inaccurate price estimates for real estate buyers and sellers, though it is incremental by adding visual data to existing methods.
The paper tackled the problem of automatic real estate price estimation by incorporating visual characteristics of houses, which are often overlooked, and showed that their method outperforms Zillow's estimates.
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.