A mass-market appraisal of the English housing rental market using a diverse range of modelling techniques

INTRODUCTION: Mass appraisals in the rental housing market are far less common than those in the sales market. However, there is evidence for substantial growth in the rental market and this lack of insight hampers commercial organisations and local and national governments in understanding this market. CASE DESCRIPTION: This case study uses data that are supplied from a property listings web site and are unique in their scale, with over 1.2 million rental property listings available over a 2 year period. The data is analysed in a large data institute using generalised linear regression, machine learning and a pseudo practitioner based approach. DISCUSSION AND EVALUATION: The study should be seen as a practical guide for property professionals and academics wishing to undertake such appraisals and looking for guidance on the best methods to use. It also provides insight into the property characteristics which most influence rental listing price. CONCLUSIONS: From the regression analysis, attributes that increase the rental listing price are: the number of rooms in the property, proximity to central London and to railway stations, being located in more affluent neighbourhoods and being close to local amenities and better performing schools. Of the machine learning algorithms used, the two tree based approaches were seen to outperform the regression based approaches. In terms of a simple measure of the median appraisal error, a practitioner based approach is seen to outperform the modelling approaches. A practical finding is that the application of sophisticated machine learning algorithms to big data is still a challenge for modern desktop PCs.