Online Reviews Sentiment Analysis Based on High-Rise Residential Projects in Malaysia

Abstract

The Malaysian property industry has suffered due to increasing numbers of unsold properties, especially high-rise residential types. Industry practitioners believed the absence of accurate market data for developers caused a mismatch where the developer failed to provide the right properties for the market demand. Thus, a crucial need to understand public opinion on sentiment and preferences for high-rise property. This study derived an online-reviews-based process for evaluating public sentiment and preferences to understand the reason behind the imbalances of supply and demand currently faced by the property industry in Malaysia. The present study introduced an alternative approach to the evaluation of public sentiments and preferences towards high-rise residential via sentiment analysis and interpreted the cause of positive and negative opinions via Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) analysis. To demonstrate the applicability of the proposed approach, an experiment based on multiple high-rise properties as a case study. The findings are expected to be employed by developers/government in the evaluation of their weaknesses and strengths on the high-rise properties project and how developers/government can improve certain areas.