Vision Based Real Estate Price Estimation

Abstract

Several online real estate database companies provide automatic estimation of market values for houses 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 these 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 novel framework for automated value assessment using these photos in addition to other home characteristics. 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.

Publication
Machine Vision and Applications
Date