It’s a Match: Predicting Potential Buyers of Commercial Real Estate Using Machine Learning

Abstract: This thesis has explored the development and potential effects of an intelligent decision support system (IDSS) to predict potential buyers for commercial real estate property. The overarching need for an IDSS of this type has been identified exists due to information overload, which the IDSS aims to reduce. By shortening the time needed to process data, time can be allocated to make sense of the environment with colleagues. The system architecture explored consisted of clustering commercial real estate buyers into groups based on their characteristics, and training a prediction model on historical transaction data from the Swedish market from the cadastral and land registration authority. The prediction model was trained to predict which out of the cluster groups most likely will buy a given property. For the clustering, three different clustering algorithms were used and evaluated, one density based, one centroid based and one hierarchical based. The best performing clustering model was the centroid based (K-means). For the predictions, three supervised Machine learning algorithms were used and evaluated. The different algorithms used were Naive Bayes, Random Forests and Support Vector Machines. The model based on Random Forests performed the best, with an accuracy of 99.9%.