MR POTATOHEAD: Real Estate Market Edition — Development of a common description template for agent-based residential real estate market models

In recent years, a wide range of agent-based real-estate market models (ABM-REMMs) have been developed to incorporate actor and environmental heterogeneity and feedbacks between scales, features not possible in traditional real-estate market models. Despite close communication and collaboration between scholars, independent research groups have developed customized model codes, often in different programming languages. To synthesize this knowledge, we present a new meta-model template "MR POTATOHEAD: Real Estate Market Edition" (MP-REME), developed collaboratively by the authors, to describe and compare six independently developed ABM-REMMs. We demonstrate that the six models are special cases of a generalized meta-model, which is suitable for a wide range of agent-based exploration of real-estate market dynamics. The MP-REME templates can serve as a design pattern to catalyze development of a community ABM-REMM code base, facilitating faster model development, model transparency and replicability, and model comparison. Residential real estate (land and housing) markets impact a wide variety of critical socio-ecological outcomes at local, national, and international scales, and scientifically robust and transparent real-estate market models are needed to explore the impacts of these markets on socio-ecological outcomes. Given the range of differences between models, development of such a standard model is critical to increase confidence in the application of ABM-REMMs to policy analysis of issues such as urban flooding, carbon sequestration, heat island mitigation, and biodiversity preservation.