Artificial intelligence algorithms to predict Italian real estate market prices

Purpose - The assessment of the Real Estate (RE) prices depends on multiple factors that traditional evaluation methods often struggle to fully understand. Housing prices, in particular, are the foundations for a better knowledge of the Built Environment and its characteristics. Recently, Machine Learning (ML) techniques, which are a subset of Artificial Intelligence, are gaining momentum in solving complex, non-linear problems like house price forecasting. Hence, this study deployed three popular ML techniques to predict dwelling prices in two cities in Italy. Design/methodology/approach - An extensive dataset about house prices is collected through API protocol in two cities in North Italy, namely Brescia and Varese. This data is used to train and test three most popular ML models, i.e. ElasticNet, XGBoost and Artificial Neural Network, in order to predict house prices with six different features. Findings - The models' performance was evaluated using the Mean Absolute Error (MAE) score. The results showed that the artificial neural network performed better than the others in predicting house prices, with a MAE 5% lower than the second-best model (which was the XGBoost). Research limitations/implications - All the models had an accuracy drop in forecasting the most expensive cases, probably due to a lack of data. Practical implications - The accessibility and easiness of the proposed model will allow future users to predict house prices with different datasets. Alternatively, further research may implement a different model using neural networks, knowing that they work better for this kind of task. Originality/value - To date, this is the first comparison of the three most popular ML models that are usually employed when predicting house prices.