Prediction of Urban House Rental Prices in Lagos - Nigeria: A Machine Learning Approach

Often, prospective tenants need to know the rental price of an apartment, and homeowners need to know how best to price their apartments. This work aims to predict house rental prices in Lagos, Nigeria, using machine learning by examining the relationship between the rental price and features such as the number of bedrooms, bathrooms, toilets, location and house status(newly built, furnished, and/or serviced). Five machine learning models were trained and evaluated using mean absolute error (MAE), root mean squared error (RMSE) and r-square (R2); the random forest regression model outperformed the other four models with the lowest MAE, RMSE and the highest R2. This study also revealed that the number of bedrooms and the apartment's location are the most significant predictors, confirmed using the feature importance analysis. The developed model can be used to estimate the rental price of a property in Lagos, Nigeria.