Abstract—Home is important for Chinese people. Because the information regarding the house attributes and surrounding environments is incomplete in most real estate agency, most house buyers are difficult to consider the overall factors effectively and only can search candidates by sorting-based approach. This study aims to develop a decision support system for housing purchasing, in which surrounding facilities of each house are quantified. Then, all considered house factors and customer preferences are incorporated into Simple Multi-Attribute Ranking Technique (SMART) to support the housing evaluation. To evaluate the validity of proposed approach, an empirical study was conducted from a real estate agency. Based on the customer requirement and preferences, the proposed approach can identify better candidate house with consider the overall house attributes and surrounding facilities. Keywords—decision support system, real estate, decision analysis, housing evaluation, SMART I. INTRODUCTION OUSE purchasing is one of important decision due to the largest expenses in a lifetime for most people. Based on different customer demand and purchasing ability such as income, each house could be satisfied to certain of customer. In order to facilitate house purchasing, real estate agencies play an important role to provide information and coordination between the sellers and customers. With advanced development in information technology and intelligent applications in recent years, real estate market has been driven to adopt innovative e-transformations [8]. Therefore, most of information regarding the housing can be captured in different real estate agencies in the website. Web service for surveying related information from the websites of real estate agencies is critical for customer before they communicate with real estate agencies. However, most websites of house agencies only provide ranking-based results by area, price, and housing size for customers without considering the overall customer preferences. To maintain the competitive advantage and capture the market sharing, house agencies need to match requirement of customers effectively. Housing attributes and surrounding environment of housing are considered for purchase housing. Chia-Yu Hsu is the assistant Professor with the Department of Information Management, Yuan Ze University, Chungli, 32003, Taiwan (phone: +886-3-4638800 ext.2793; fax: +886-3-435-2077; e-mail: cyhsu@saturn.yzu.edu.tw). Julaimin Goh is the master student with the Department of Information Management, Yuan Ze University, Chungli, 32003, Taiwan (e-mail: julaimon@hotmail.com). Pei-Chann Chang is the Professor with the Department of Information Management, Yuan Ze University, Chungli, 32003, Taiwan (e-mail: iepchang@saturn.yzu.edu.tw). Most information of housing attributes including price, housing size, address and number of room are provided without lacking for quantitative information of surrounding environments for each house. In particular, some facilities can enhance the quality of living such as school, super market, convenience store and some facilities will distract people such like funeral and tomb. Therefore, the spatial information of surrounding area needs to be identified by using Geographic Information System (GIS). However, most information available on the web is only readable to humans through presentation oriented HTML pages [7] [9]. This study aims to develop a decision support system for housing purchasing, in which Simple Multi-Attribute Ranking Technique (SMART) is applied to support the housing evaluation based on customer preference. The proposed methods provide not only housing attributes but also information of surrounding environment for making decisions of housing purchasing. With the developed decision support system of housing purchasing, customers can get required information effectively to enhance decision quality. II. LITERATURE REVIEW A. Taiwan Real-Estate Condition Real-estate agency is to provide service and make communication between buyer and seller. According to Department of Land Administration of Taiwan until 2011, there are around 1685 agencies store which provide service for customer. The types of house purchasing can be classified into two types [1]. The first one is “full-time entrusted” means that one customer only entrusts with one real estate agency. The “generally entrust” means that one customer entrusts with many real estate agencies. However, customers need to use a lot of time for searching and matching their ideal house. House is one of luxury product with heterogeneity, expensive and low buying frequency that can be waste a lot of time and spend a lot of money on it. Generally, the housing buyers in Taiwan need around six months to find an ideal house without including investor [3]. House interior factors and location place are two mainly considered for buyer [2]. Each buyer also has different preference in ideal house. House factors can be divided into three aspects including environmental, social, and personal as listed in Table I [2]. Commonly real-estate agency website provides housing sequence for buyer by search-based engine, but only binary information for their location of facilities nearby is provided (i.e. yes and no). Customer usually considers not only house attribute but also traffic conditions, surrounding facilities and environmental. Therefore, we consider the distance in between house and facilities and incorporate such information for buyers into match their preference. Development of Decision Support System for House Evaluation and Purchasing H Chia-Yu Hsu, Julaimin Goh and Pei-Chann Chang World Academy of Science, Engineering and Technology 65 2012 592