Classification and Geotemporal Analysis of Quality-of-Life Issues in Tenant Reviews

Adam Haber, Zeev Waks


Abstract
Online tenant reviews of multifamily residential properties present a unique source of information for commercial real estate investing and research. Real estate professionals frequently read tenant reviews to uncover property-related issues that are otherwise difficult to detect, a process that is both biased and time-consuming. Using this as motivation, we asked whether a text classification-based approach can automate the detection of four carefully defined, major quality-of-life issues: severe crime, noise nuisance, pest burden, and parking difficulties. We aggregate 5.5 million tenant reviews from five sources and use two-stage crowdsourced labeling on 0.1% of the data to produce high-quality labels for subsequent text classification. Following fine-tuning of pretrained language models on millions of reviews, we train a multi-label reviews classifier that achieves a mean AUROC of 0.965 on these labels. We next use the model to reveal temporal and spatial patterns among tens of thousands of multifamily properties. Collectively, these results highlight the feasibility of automated analysis of housing trends and investment opportunities using tenant-perspective data.
Anthology ID:
2021.findings-emnlp.217
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2541–2553
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.217
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.findings-emnlp.217
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Adam Haber and Zeev Waks. 2021. Classification and Geotemporal Analysis of Quality-of-Life Issues in Tenant Reviews. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021, pages 2541–2553, Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Classification and Geotemporal Analysis of Quality-of-Life Issues in Tenant Reviews (Haber & Waks, Findings 2021)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.217.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.findings-emnlp.217.mp4