Housing in Affluent vs. Deprived Areas: An Analysis of Online Housing Advertisements in Dublin

Arjumand Younus, Muhammad Atif Qureshi, Michael P. O'Mahony

Abstract: The e-commerce boom has shifted the real estate market to an online medium whereby realtors and owners can post their property listings. A recent focus of the research community has been studying various aspects of these online property portals. We perform a textual analytics study for a popular Irish portal with Dublin being our case-study on account of its severe housing crisis and heterogeneous regions. We extract various textual features from within the property advertisements and analyse their correlations with the deprivation index of the location in which the property is located thereby attempting to understand how affluence of a location influences the way in which advertisements are framed, and thereby aiding the user towards the interpretation of property advertisements. The correlation analysis reveals interesting outcomes depicting tendency of realtors/owners to over emphasize location aspects of a property for affluent locations.