Recommender systems in real estate: a systematic review
2025, Bulletin of Electrical Engineering and Informatics
https://doi.org/10.11591/EEI.V14I3.8884Abstract
The constant growth of online real estate information has emphasized the need for the creation and improvement of intelligent recommendation systems to help mitigate the difficulties associated with user decision making. This systematic review, following the preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA) guidelines and criteria, investigates current approaches and models used in real estate recommendation systems, with a focus on papers published in 2019 and 2024. The review identifies four main techniques: content-based filtering, collaborative filtering, knowledge-based systems, and hybrid approaches. Key findings indicate a preference for deep learning models, specifically convolutional neural network and long-short term memory (CNN-LSTM) architectures, and highlight the most used property characteristics: price, number of rooms, size, and location. The research addresses several important challenges, including the cold start problem, data sparsity, and the importance of adaptive learning in dynamic markets. Potential future research fields are outlined, with a focus on hybrid model architectures, attention mechanisms, and explainable artificial intelligence (AI). This review provides a comprehensive overview of the field, enabling scholars and practitioners to improve the accuracy and user experience of real estate recommendation systems.
References (70)
- "Data growth worldwide 2010-2025," Statista. [Online]. Available: https://www.statista.com/statistics/871513/worldwide-data- created/, (Accessed: May. 23, 2024).
- M. Salehi, I. N. Kamalabadi, and M. B. G. Ghoushchi, "Personalized recommendation of learning material using sequential pattern mining and attribute based collaborative filtering," Education and Information Technologies, vol. 19, no. 4, pp. 713-735, 2014, doi: 10.1007/s10639-012-9245-5.
- H. E. Pence, "What is Big Data and Why is it Important?," Journal of Educational Technology Systems, vol. 43, no. 2, pp. 159- 171, 2014, doi: 10.2190/ET.43.2.d.
- L. Lü, M. Medo, C. H. Yeung, Y.-C. Zhang, Z.-K. Zhang, and T. Zhou, "Recommender systems," Physics Reports, vol. 519, no. 1, pp. 1-49, Oct. 2012, doi: 10.1016/j.physrep.2012.02.006.
- L. Chen and P. Pu, "Preference-Based Organization Interfaces: Aiding User Critiques in Recommender Systems," in User Modeling 2007, C. Conati, K. McCoy, and G. Paliouras, Eds., Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 2007, pp. 77-86, doi: 10.1007/978-3- 540-73078-1_11.
- M. Mubarak et al., "A Map-Based Recommendation System and House Price Prediction Model for Real Estate," ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, vol. 11, no. 3, no. 3, 2022, doi: 10.3390/ijgi11030178.
- A. Gharahighehi, K. Pliakos, and C. Vens, "Recommender Systems in the Real Estate Market-A Survey," Applied Sciences, vol. 11, no. 16, no. 16, 2021, doi: 10.3390/app11167502.
- J. S. Breese, D. Heckerman, and C. Kadie, "Empirical analysis of predictive algorithms for collaborative filtering," in Proceedings of the Fourteenth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, in UAI'98. San Francisco, CA, USA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc., 1998, pp. 43-52.
- M. K. Najafabadi and M. N. Mahrin, "A systematic literature review on the state of research and practice of collab-orative filtering technique and implicit feedback," Artificial Intelligence Review, vol. 45, no. 2, pp. 167-201, 2016, doi: 10.1007/s10462- ISSN: 2302-9285
- Bulletin of Electr Eng & Inf, Vol. 14, No. 3, June 2025: 2156-2170 2168 015-9443-9.
- L. Wang, X. Hu, J. Wei, and X. Cui, "A Collaborative Filtering Based Personalized TOP-K Recommender System for Housing," Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference of Modern Computer Science and Applications, 2024, vol. 191, pp. 461-466, doi: 10.1007/978-3-642-33030-8_74.
- P. Lops, D. Jannach, C. Musto, T. Bogers, and M. Koolen, "Trends in content-based recommendation," User Model User-Adap Inter, vol. 29, no. 2, pp. 239-249, 2019, doi: 10.1007/s11257-019-09231-w.
- S. Ayyaz, U. Qamar, and R. Nawaz, "HCF-CRS: A Hybrid Content based Fuzzy Conformal Recommender System for providing recommendations with confidence," PLoS One, vol. 13, no. 10, 2018, doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0204849.
- T. Badriyah, S. Azvy, W. Yuwono, and I. Syarif, "Recommendation system for property search using content based filtering method," in 2018 International Conference on Information and Communications Technology (ICOIACT), pp. 25-29, 2018, doi: 10.1109/ICOIACT.2018.8350801.
- Q. Zhang, D. Zhang, J. Lu, G. Zhang, W. Qu, and M. Cohen, "A Recommender System for Cold-start Items: A Case Study in the Real Estate Industry," in 2019 IEEE 14th International Conference on Intelligent Systems and Knowledge Engineering (ISKE), pp. 1185-1192, 2019, doi: 10.1109/ISKE47853.2019.9170411.
- B. Lika, K. Kolomvatsos, and S. Hadjiefthymiades, "Facing the cold start problem in recommender systems," Expert Systems with Applications, vol. 41, no. 4, Part 2, pp. 2065-2073, 2014, doi: 10.1016/j.eswa.2013.09.005.
- D. B. Tonara, "Recommender System in Property Business a Case Study from Surabaya, Indonesia," 2014. [Online]. Available: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Recommender-System-in-Property-Business-a-Case-from Tonara/5eb78abab36df5dbc2908aacbb1e551e0bb8ac70. (Accessed: May. 28, 2024).
- F. Rehman, H. Masood, A. Ul-Hasan, R. Nawaz, and F. Shafait, "An Intelligent Context Aware Recommender Sys-tem for Real- Estate," Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence: Third Mediterranean Conference, MedPRAI 2019, 2020, vol. 1144, pp. 177-191, doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-37548-5_14.
- F. Ricci, L. Rokach, B. Shapira, "Introduction to Recommender Systems Handbook," in Recommender Systems Handbook, F. Ricci, L. Rokach, B. Shapira, and P. B. Kantor, Eds., Boston, MA: Springer US, pp. 1-35, 2011, doi: 10.1007/978-0-387-85820- 3_1.
- B. Kumar, "Impact of digital marketing and e-commerce on the real estate industry," International Journal of Research in Business Management, vol. 2, no. 7, pp. 17-22, Jul. 2024.
- J. Shaw, "Platform Real Estate: theory and practice of new urban real estate markets," Urban Geography, vol. 41, no. 8, pp. 1037-1064, 2020, doi: 10.1080/02723638.2018.1524653.
- J. Saginor, "The Real Estate Academic Leadership (REAL) Rankings for 2016-2020," Journal of Real Estate Literature, vol. 28, no 2, pp. 150-160, 2021, doi: 10.1080/09277544.2021.1876436.
- T.-Y. Ou, G.-Y. Lin, H.-P. Fu, S.-C. Wei, and W.-L. Tsai, "An Intelligent Recommendation System for Real Estate Commodity," CSSE, vol. 42, no. 3, pp. 881-897, 2022, doi: 10.32604/csse.2022.022637.
- R. H. Kabir, B. Pervaiz, T. M. Khan, A. Ul-Hasan, R. Nawaz, and F. Shafait, "DeepRank: Adapting Neural Tensor Networks for Ranking the Recommendations," in Pattern Recognition and Artificial Intelligence: Third Mediterranean Conference, MedPRAI 2019, 2020, pp. 162-176, doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-37548-5_13.
- J. Chung, C. Gulcehre, K. Cho, and Y. Bengio, "Empirical evaluation of gated recurrent neural networks on se-quence modeling," arXiv, 2014, doi: 10.48550/arXiv.1412.3555.
- T. Nguyen, S. Vu, T. Nguyen, V. Pham, and H. Nguyen, "Design a Recommendation System in Real Estate Invest-ment Based on Context Approach:" in Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management, Rome, Italy: SCITEPRESS -Science and Technology Publications, 2023, pp. 255-263, doi: 10.5220/0012210800003598.
- R. D. Burke, K. J. Hammond, and B. C. Young, "Knowledge-based navigation of complex information spaces," in Proceedings of the Thirteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 1996, vol. 1, pp. 462-468.
- M. J. Page et al., "Declaración PRISMA 2020: una guía actualizada para la publicación de revisiones sistemáticas," Revista Española de Cardiología, vol. 74, no. 9, pp. 790-799, 2021, doi: 10.1016/j.recesp.2021.06.016.
- D. Budgen and P. Brereton, "Performing systematic literature reviews in software engineering," in Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Software Engineering, ACM, 2006, pp. 1051-1052, doi: 10.1145/1134285.1134500.
- D. Moher, A. Liberati, J. Tetzlaff, and D. G. Altman, "Preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses: the PRISMA statement," BMJ, vol. 339, p. b2535, Jul. 2009, doi: 10.1136/bmj.b2535.
- B. Kitchenham and P. Brereton, "A systematic review of systematic review process research in software engineering," Information and Software Technology, vol. 55, no. 12, pp. 2049-2075, 2013, doi: 10.1016/j.infsof.2013.07.010.
- R. Pranckutė, "Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus: The Titans of Bibliographic Information in Today's Academic World," Publications, vol. 9, no. 1, 2021, doi: 10.3390/publications9010012.
- "Web of Science platform," Clarivate. [Online]. Available: https://clarivate.com/products/scientific-and-academic- research/research-discovery-and-workflow-solutions/webofscience-platform/. (Accessed: May. 30, 2024).
- M. E. Falagas, E. I. Pitsouni, G. A. Malietzis, and G. Pappas, "Comparison of PubMed, Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar: strengths and weaknesses," The FASEB journal, vol. 22, no. 2, pp. 338-342, Feb. 2008, doi: 10.1096/fj.07-9492LSF.
- P. Mongeon and A. Paul-Hus, "The journal coverage of Web of Science and Scopus: a comparative analysis," Scientometrics, vol. 106, no. 1, pp. 213-228, 2016, doi: 10.1007/s11192-015-1765-5.
- W. M. Bramer, G. B. de Jonge, M. L. Rethlefsen, F. Mast, and J. Kleijnen, "A systematic approach to searching: an efficient and complete method to develop literature searches," Journal of the Medical Library Association: JMLA, vol. 106, no. 4, pp. 531-541, 2018, doi: 10.5195/jmla.2018.283.
- A.-W. Harzing and S. Alakangas, "Google Scholar, Scopus and the Web of Science: a longitudinal and cross-disciplinary comparison," Scientometrics, vol. 106, no. 2, pp. 787-804, Feb. 2016, doi: 10.1007/s11192-015-1798-9.
- K. Petersen, S. Vakkalanka, and L. Kuzniarz, "Guidelines for conducting systematic mapping studies in software engineering: An update," Information and Software Technology, vol. 64, pp. 1-18, 2015, doi: 10.1016/j.infsof.2015.03.007.
- R. Mu, "A Survey of Recommender Systems Based on Deep Learning," IEEE Access, vol. 6, pp. 69009-69022, 2018, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2018.2880197.
- R. Socher, D. Chen, C. D. Manning, and A. Y. Ng, "Reasoning with neural tensor networks for knowledge base completion," in Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2013, vol. 1, pp. 926-934.
- Y. Li, S. Gao, W. Wu, P. Xie, and H. Xia, "Research and Development Housing Rental System with Recommendation System Bulletin of Electr Eng & Inf ISSN: 2302-9285
- Recommender systems in real estate: a systematic review (Carlos Henríquez-Miranda) 2169
- Based on SpringBoot," in: Emerging Trends in Intelligent and Interactive Systems and Applications: Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Intelligent, Interactive Systems and Applications (IISA2020), 2021, pp. 619-627, doi: 10.1007/978-3- 030-63784-2_77.
- L. Shen, Q. Liu, G. Chen, and S. Ji, "Text-based price recommendation system for online rental houses," Big Data Mining and Analytics, vol. 3, no. 2, pp. 143-152, 2020, doi: 10.26599/BDMA.2019.9020023.
- X. Shi and Y. Jiang, "Research on House Rental Recommendation Algorithm Based on Deep Learning," in 2022 3rd International Conference on Big Data Economy and Information Management (BDEIM 2022), Atlantis Press, pp. 604-613, 2023, doi: 10.2991/978-94-6463-124-1_70.
- K. Milkovich, S. Shirur, P. K. Desai, L. Manjunath and W. Wu, "ZenDen -A Personalized House Searching Application," in 2020 IEEE Sixth International Conference on Big Data Computing Service and Applications (BigDataService), Oxford, UK, pp. 173-178, 2020, doi: 10.1109/BigDataService49289.2020.00034.
- J. Knoll, R. Groß, A. Schwanke, B. Rinn, and M. Schreyer, "Applying Recommender Approaches to the Real Estate e-Commerce Market," in Innovations for Community Services: 18th International Conference, I4CS 2018, 2018, pp. 111-126, 2018, doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-93408-2_9.
- Y. Yu, C. Wang, L. Zhang, R. Gao, and H. Wang, "Geographical Proximity Boosted Recommendation Algorithms for Real Estate," in Web Information Systems Engineering-WISE 2018: 19th International Conference, pp. 51-66, 2018, doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-02925-8_4.
- H. J. Jun, J. H. Kim, D. Y. Rhee, and S. W. Chang, "'SeoulHouse2Vec': An Embedding-Based Collaborative Housing Recommender System for Analyzing Housing Preference," Sustainability, vol. 12, no. 17, 2020, doi: 10.3390/su12176964.
- F. Liu and W. -W. Guo, "Research on House Recommendation Model Based on Cosine Similarity in Deep Learning Mode in Grid Environment," in 2019 International Conference on Virtual Reality and Intelligent Systems (ICVRIS), Jishou, China, 2019, pp. 121-124, doi: 10.1109/ICVRIS.2019.00039.
- B. Hidasi, A. Karatzoglou, L. Baltrunas, and D. Tikk, "Session-based Recommendations with Recurrent Neural Networks," arXiv, Mar. 29, 2016, doi: 10.48550/arXiv.1511.06939.
- B. Hidasi and A. Karatzoglou, "Recurrent Neural Networks with Top-k Gains for Session-based Recommendations," in Proceedings of the 27th ACM International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management, 2018, pp. 843-852, doi: 10.1145/3269206.3271761.
- R. Logesh and V. Subramaniyaswamy, "Exploring Hybrid Recommender Systems for Personalized Travel Applications," in Cognitive Informatics and Soft Computing: Proceeding of CISC 2017, pp. 535-544, 2019, doi: 10.1007/978-981-13-0617-4_52.
- J. Malczewski and M. Jelokhani-niaraki, "An ontology-based multicriteria spatial decision support sys-tem: a case study of house selection," Geo-spatial Information Science, vol. 15, no. 3, pp. 177-185, 2024, doi: 10.1080/10095020.2012.715900.
- R. Burke, "Hybrid Recommender Systems: Survey and Experiments," User Model User-Adap Inter, vol. 12, no. 4, pp. 331-370, Nov. 2002, doi: 10.1023/A:1021240730564.
- M. Batet, A. Moreno, D. Sánchez, D. Isern, and A. Valls, "Turist@: Agent-based personalised recommendation of tourist activities," Expert Systems with Applications, vol. 39, no. 8, pp. 7319-7329, Jun. 2012, doi: 10.1016/j.eswa.2012.01.086.
- E. M. Daly, A. Botea, A. Kishimoto, and R. Marinescu, "Multi-criteria journey aware housing recommender system," in RecSys '14: Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, Oct. 2014, pp. 325-328, doi: 10.1145/2645710.2645764.
- H.-P. Ho, C.-T. Chang, and C.-Y. Ku, "House selection via the internet by considering homebuyers' risk attitudes with S-shaped utility functions," European Journal of Operational Research, vol. 241, no. 1, pp. 188-201, Feb. 2015, doi: 10.1016/j.ejor.2014.08.009.
- S. Das, S. Ghosh, B. S. P. Mishra, and M. K. Mishra, "A Novel Recommendation System for Housing Search: An MCDM Approach," in Proceedings of International Conference on Recent Trends in Machine Learning, IoT, Smart Cities and Applications, 2021, pp. 251-258, doi: 10.1007/978-981-15-7234-0_21.
- D. Oh and C. L. Tan, "Making Better Recommendations with Online Profiling Agents," AI Magazine, vol. 26, no. 3, 2005, doi: 10.1609/aimag.v26i3.1823.
- S. Shearin and H. Lieberman, "Intelligent profiling by example," in Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, 2001, pp. 145-151, doi: 10.1145/359784.360325.
- S. Li, S. Nomura, Y. Kikuta, and K. Arino, "Web-Scale Personalized Real-Time Recommender System on Suumo," Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, pp. 521-538, 2017, doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-57529-2_41.
- P. Chonwiharnphan, P. Thienprapasith, and E. Chuangsuwanich, "Generating Realistic Users Using Generative Adversarial Network With Recommendation-Based Embedding," IEEE Access, vol. 8, pp. 41384-41393, 2020, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2020.2976491.
- F. Colace et al., "Recommender systems: a novel approach based on singular value decomposition," International Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering (IJECE), vol. 12, no. 6, pp.6513-6521, 2022, doi: 10.11591/ijece.v12i6.pp6513-6521.
- K. Rrmoku, B. Selimi, and L. Ahmedi, "Provenance and social network analysis for recommender systems: a litera-ture review," International Journal of Electrical and Computer Engineering (IJECE), vol. 12, no. 5, pp. 5383-5392, 2022, doi: 10.11591/ijece.v12i5.pp5383-5392.
- D. H. Park, H. K. Kim, I. Y. Choi, and J. K. Kim, "A literature review and classification of recommender systems research," Expert Systems with Applications, vol. 39, no. 11, pp. 10059-10072, 2012, doi: 10.1016/j.eswa.2012.02.038.
- R. Devooght and H. Bersini, "Collaborative Filtering with Recurrent Neural Networks," arXiv, 2017, doi: 10.48550/arXiv.1608.07400.
- C.-Y.
- Wu, A. Ahmed, A. Beutel, A. J. Smola, and H. Jing, "Recurrent Recommender Networks," in Proceedings of the Tenth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, in WSDM '17, 2017, pp. 495-503, doi: 10.1145/3018661.3018689.
- S. M. Lundberg and S.-I. Lee, "A unified approach to interpreting model predictions," in Proceedings of the 31st In-ternational Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, 2017, pp. 4768-4777.