A novel fuzzy group decision making approach for buying a house in pandemic process

ABSTRACT

After the detection of the first official case diagnosed with COVID-19 on March 2020, the new package called as "Economic Stability Shield” have been implemented in Turkey to minimize the effects of the pandemic. As in all sectors, the epidemic caused various changes in the real estate sector. The demands of citizens who stayed in homes for a long time during the epidemic period have also changed when buying a house. This study aims to investigate the importance of selection criteria for buying a house criterion in the real estate sector and to determine the most suitable house of via a Multi-Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) approach. By integrating Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) and Multi-Attribute Ideal Real Comparative Analysis (FMAIRCA), the assessment criteria of buying house and suitable houses are evaluated. While making this evaluation, the weights of the criteria are obtained by pairwise comparisons under fuzzy environment through collected from five households living in Konya. Next, the FMAIRCA method is used to rank the candidate houses according to the views of the households. As a result of the study, it has been determined that the criteria of eligibility for credit are the most important criteria. For the case study, we perform a comparative analysis on the performance of fuzzy TOPSIS and fuzzy VIKOR in buying a house. Our comparative analysis for this case study shows that the three fuzzy MCDM methods achieve the identical rankings. © 2023 Gazi Universitesi Muhendislik-Mimarlik. All rights reserved.