Year: 2025
Type: conference-paper
Abstract: Access to metro systems plays a critical role in shaping urban housing markets by enhancing neighborhood accessibility and driving property demand. We present RailEstate, a novel web-based system that integrates spatial analytics, natural language interfaces, and interactive forecasting to analyze how proximity to metro stations influences residential property prices in the Washington metropolitan area. Unlike static mapping tools or generic listing platforms, RailEstate combines 25 years of historical housing data with transit infrastructure to support low-latency geospatial queries, time-series visualizations, and predictive modeling. Users can interactively explore ZIP-code-level price patterns, investigate long-term trends, and forecast future housing values around any metro station. A key innovation is our natural language chatbot, which translates plain-English questions (e.g., "What is the highest price in Falls Church in the year 2000?") into executable SQL over a spatial database. This unified and interactive platform empowers urban planners, investors, and residents to derive actionable insights from metro-linked housing data—without requiring technical expertise. A demonstration video of the system is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZLiz8S1UXsc.
Authors: Chen-Wei Chang, Yu-Chieh Cheng, Yun-En Tsai, Fanglan Chen, Chang-Tien Lu
Institution: Virginia Tech
Language: English
Topic: Housing Market and Economics
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4415935394
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