David Schober

David is a master student (M.Sc.) in business administration with a specialization in marketing and market research at the University of Vienna in Austria. Besides his studies, he works part time in a real estate agency in the fields of marketing and project management. In his master thesis, David investigates the different influences of internal apartment attributes on the final rent decision. His buying behavior study will take place in the Vienna apartment market.

With the growing urban population and the rising migration from the rural areas, the demand for apartments in the cities is increasing and due to that, the prices are more and more exploding. Due to the fact, that a “normal” (not luxury segment) apartment is never perfect in every feature, in most cases the person looking for a flat must do a trade-off between the existing features in deciding for a final apartment. With his master thesis, David wants to analyze the preferences of the customers (prospective flat customer) in the Vienna rental apartment market. More precisely, he wants to study the weight and the effect of specific internal apartment features on the overall preference of the prospective renter. Therefore, he conducts an adaptive conjoint analysis, to find out the different utilities of the specific features of an apartment. In the end, he will compare his findings with the currently used parameters for determining rental prices. If the results of his analysis show differences to the currently used features, they can be used to create a new method to determine apartment rents. With this knowledge, real estate agents are more capable of revealing overpriced and hard to mediate rental apartments.

For his analysis, he uses the Adaptive-Conjoint Analysis (ACA) of Lighthouse Studio, provided by Sawtooth Software, Inc.