A MULTIPLE CRITERIA ANALYSIS MODEL FOR REAL-ESTATE EVALUATION

Real estate evaluation is of great importance and interest to many soc io-economic agents, especially to property buyers and sellers for pers onal benefits, municipalities for tax purposes, financial institutions for loan policies, and to real estate brokerage firms for marketing a ctivities. Although these agents are motivated in their actions by dif ferent objectives, even conflicting at times, they all desire to have a realistic description of the real estate market behavior in order to make right and timely decisions. This article presents an estimation model to describe the behavior of real estate markets. The model is ba sed on certain observable real estate market data as well as on the pe rceptions of real estate agents who are active in the market. The para meters that describe the behavior of the real estate market are estima ted, through the estimation model, using mathematical programming tool s within a multiple criteria analysis context. The usefulness and appl icability of the approach is empirically shown through an implementati on using the data of the City of Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.