Property searching web application with smarter map-view-based search features

• Main Author: Yuan, Zijie
• Other Authors: Ong Yew Soon
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2016
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/66802
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Nowadays, with the prosperous growth of the property market, there are waves of new property websites taking the world by storm. Searching rental or sales property online effectively became a strong demand and received attention from research and industry, however, there is a significantly under-explored area of effective property searching. Present property searching platforms generally dump excessive amount of search results to users, which prevent users to find what they really need. There is a lack of transferring the underlying interconnections among all the results into beneficial insights, which can provide more relevant results and help property seekers make more intelligent decisions. We believe that the quality of searching results can be significantly enhanced by leveraging smarter map-view-based features. Taking this cue, this project developed a web application to explore some property searching methodologies based on map view using Google Maps APIs, which analyzes the inter-connections among locations and the routing possibilities of the result sets to help property seekers find better results based on their customized search requirements. We proposed and implement four map-view-based searching methods as followed: 1. Keyword search 2. Place-based search: Search properties near a specific location 3. Amenities-based search: Search properties near one or more types of amenities 4. Fastest route search: Recommending properties that have fastest route to multiple destinations Different types of shortest path algorithms were studied and evaluated to contribute to the fastest routing search methods. A new property searching website with friendly user interface was developed to support the implementation and evaluation of the smarter map-view-based features. Multiple APIs were evaluated and integrated into the website system, which can be integrated with commercial properties platforms or other map-view-related platforms to provide smarter location search in the future.