I’m sure you have heard, or maybe you yourself were a participant in such a situation when on a popular website you choose an apartment, a premise for a warehouse or an office, and as a result, reality did not match the photographs or such a room did not exist at all, and the ad was created by an unscrupulous realtor to collect the database data, for example. Such stories have a bad effect on the entire real estate market.
Making the market safe is the goal of many corporations, companies and organizations from different fields. One of the latest achievements in this direction is the use of intelligent data processing — Data mining. With the help of artificial intelligence, machine learning, various database technologies, it is able to discover unexpected, previously unknown relationships between data. For example, in Russia, one of the largest real estate classifieds sites, according to internal statistics, had about 2% of fake ads from the total number of new offers per day. Data mining was able to reduce this percentage by recognizing photographs and identifying similar ones. At the same time, he compared not only identical images, but also could compare photographs subject to change: adding brightness, cropping, changing color, and so on.
What are the benefits of intelligent data processing?
If we return to the same example with photographs, then after recognizing two identical ads, the question arises: which one is real? In addition, not only scammers can use the same photos, but, for example, an advertisement for the sale of an apartment can be put up by a realtor and the owner of the apartment himself. Or the object is resold, and according to the algorithm, the first message will be correct, and the second fake .
Intelligent processing is able to collect a selection of such ads and, according to additional parameters: price, date and time of posting, description, and so on, to reveal really false offers.
If we take a broad approach to this process, then the system can be trained to collect all available data, and not be limited to only one site.
Identifying implausible ads is not the limit of such a system. Its advantage is also that according to how the user of this or that site behaves, what actions he takes, his further steps can be predicted. This way you can predict financial fraud with identity theft, transfer of other people’s funds, and so on. This will bring us one step closer to investing safely in real estate.
How else can data mining help?
Of course, the fight against fraud is an important advantage, but far from the only one when using this system:
1. Data classification. The system is able to display a list of offers according to the specified parameters, exactly those that are of interest to you or your client.
2. Associative data. This is an opportunity to show not only the ads that interest you, but also offers that could potentially interest you. For example, you are looking for a property in a certain area, but the system sees that users who are looking at offers there are still interested in the neighboring area, so it may offer you to look at the property there as well.
3. Data clustering when similar offers are displayed. For example, compare the price of the same object on different sites.
4. Regression analysis, when the user is shown not just a list of information on a specific object, but also predicts a change, for example, in price or demand.
Data forecasting is an item that deserves special attention. Intelligent data processing is able to detect or identify similar patterns, trends over a certain period. She analyzes past events to show a picture of the future.
The disadvantage of intelligent processing is that its implementation requires almost completely changing business practices in the real estate market. Requires a transition from “every man for himself” to a common system. Requires specialists and re-equipment of companies.
But I think that we can come to an agreement with each other and make the real estate market transparent and safe.
Dmitry Tsyplakov, CPO of Fincase
