Landlord-Tenant Matching System: A Design Science Framework

The recent uptick of immigration in a post-COVID world has seen an increase in number of international students coming into the country. In the current real estate sector, meeting the housing needs of these new immigrants requires a leap of faith by the landlords due to the lack of information available on these new immigrants. The lack of trust in this relationship is a research gap that is addressed by interpreting research done in the field of principal-agency problems to understand information asymmetry and its impact on the relationship and feedback intermediaries as a method of injecting trust. By utilizing a design science approach, this thesis designs a methodological framework that utilizes structured data to evaluate landlords and tenants. The thesis defines attributes of ideal tenant and landlord through a literature survey of rental sectors across the world. These attributes are then measured by applying decision analysis methods to the structured data to generate an objective numeric score for both tenants and landlords. This score is then used to generate a candidate list of potential tenants for the landlord to choose from. The system presented by the thesis utilizes a methodology that is field agnostic. The ability to characterize entities would be of great benefit to other ecosystems that rely on complete understanding of its participants to forge business or transactional relationships. The presence of such a system would alleviate the barriers faced by new immigrants in the rental market and alleviate the need for an act of goodwill from the landlords.

Name thesis:degree_name

M.Sc. Management

Level thesis:degree_level

Masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Faculty of Business

Department dc:contributor.department

Faculty of Business Programs

Grantor

Brock University

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Ramaswamy, Shodhanth

• design science
• recommendation system
• rental sector
• tenant-landlord relationships
• entity characterization

Statement dc:rights

• Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/10464/17980

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:brocku.scholaris.ca:10464/17980