PropTech for Proactive Pricing of Houses in Classified Advertisements in the Indian Real Estate Market

Abstract: Property Technology (PropTech) is the next big thing that is going to disrupt the real estate market. Nowadays, we see applications of Machine Learning (ML) and AI in almost all the domains but for a long time the real estate industry was quite slow in adopting data science and machine learning for problem solving and improving their processes. However, things are changing quite fast as we see a lot of adoption of AI and ML in the US and European real estate markets. But the Indian real estate market has to catch-up a lot. This paper proposes a machine learning approach for solving the house price prediction problem in the classified advertisements. This study focuses on the Indian real estate market. We apply advanced machine learning algorithms such as Random forest, Gradient boosting and Artificial neural networks on a real world dataset and compare the performance of these methods. We find that the Random forest method is the best performer in terms of prediction accuracy.