Yet another exciting study undertaken had the industry partner (a real estate firm) wanting to incorporate social listening of current & prospective homeowners to understand the needs and pain points concerning homeownership. The idea was to generate chatter on various social media platforms and third-party websites like Magicbricks and incorporate parts of these engagements into the design. The study tried to leverage the data available from social media engagements.

The concerned real estate company is present on most social media channels. The researchers tried to understand the company’s current social media activities, channels, and platforms in this study.

The researchers sifted & sorted the data for availability & relevance to the study and conducted an Exploratory Analysis of it. Then, they undertook an N-gram analysis to identify keywords and classify the data. E.g., On Youtube, python code that utilized Youtube's API v3 extracted comments under each video. Text Processing followed Data Extraction.

The project managed to get insights into what people talk about real estate on the internet more often- The price of apartments and the square footage. However, the study found not much social media chatter regarding design elements of homes/ apartments.

The Report recommended that the firm proactively initiates campaigns on social media to generate user content where people express their design ideas with regards homeownership.

Once such pertinent data is available, the process, methodology, and analysis can be used as a framework to obtain deeper insights into homeowners' preferences and incorporate them into product design.

References: 

Viswanathan M., Raman A., John GM., Patil M., 'Social Listening in Real Estate,' 2021.