GIS for house hunters: a case study in Toowoomba

Abstract

House hunting is one of the most important activities for many families in Australia and worldwide, which also involves difficult decisions to make. Currently, the process of hunting for a house requires looking and inspecting individual houses with or without the guide of a real estate agent. This is a time consuming process, and even though, the house hunters may still miss out the ideal home they dream of. This project demonstrated a method where Geographic Information System (GIS) technique can be used to help house hunters to identify and choose their dream home. GIS is a powerful set of tools for capturing, organising, retrieving at will, analysing and presenting spatially referenced data from the real world for a particular set of purposes. This technology is ideal for the application of location-based services, such as the property listing and selling in the real estate industry. In this project, a user-friendly GIS program was developed to manipulate the property listing for sale geographically, to display the property listing in relation to other social and environmental features including topography, transportation, schools and/or shopping centres, and to provide tools for the house hunters to search and inspect properties and make choices without the need of getting into the houses. Even though open house inspection is still required before a final decision is made, these inspections can be limited to only a small number of houses, making the process of house hunting faster and also reducing the danger of missing out the ideal house for the hunter. Compared to the conventional way of getting a property list and inspecting them one by one, the GIS based property searching and inspection tools are proved to be more efficient and less time consuming. The project demonstrated that GIS provides powerful tools in assisting the house hunters searching for houses and make informed and intelligent decisions. The GIS program developed in this project can be easily used by the real estate practitioners in property selling or renting, which will improve their business efficiency.