This article examines current trends in the residential real estate market of small Russian towns. It argues that the GIS solutions currently available to sellers and buyers of housing lag behind the actual needs of real estate market participants in provincial settings. A key source of this informational imbalance is the insufficient availability of spatial analysis tools for citizens searching for housing in small Russian towns. Existing commercial and open geoinformation solutions for real estate market participants are mainly designed for mass listings in large urban agglomerations. As a result, they do not account for the specific features of fragmented real estate data in provincial regions and do not provide an integrated assessment of housing that incorporates urban-landscape factors of residential comfort. The article proposes a concept for a geographic information system that enables the collection, harmonization, statistical processing, and geoinformation visualization of heterogeneous data on real estate in small towns. Its input data include listing databases from online aggregators, digital maps from non-commercial sources, and individual user markers. The main section of the article is devoted to the role of user markers in characterizing the residential comfort of urban neighborhoods in small towns. The study demonstrates the importance of a multidimensional characterization of real estate, rather than one limited to price indicators alone. When analyzing a specific location, it is necessary to assess the comfort-related factors and the degree of urbanization of the neighborhoods where prospective housing purchases are considered. The paper also discusses promising approaches to decision support for different user groups, ranging from private homebuyers to urban studies researchers.

Dmitriy V. Dobrynin
Senior Lecturer of the Department of Geoinformation Systems and Technologies
Institute of Systems Analysis and Management
Dubna State University
19, Universitetskaya Str. ,141980, Moscow region, Dubna, Russia
e-mail: ddobrynin@yandex.ru
ORCID: 0000-0003-2432-6534
SPIN-code: 7089-6356
AuthorID: 92042

Pavel S. Lebedev
Assistant, programmer of the Department of Geoinformation Systems and Technologies
Institute of Systems Analysis and Management
Dubna State University
19, Universitetskaya Str. ,141980, Moscow region, Dubna, Russia
Engineer
All-Russian Research Geological Oil Institute
8, Varshavskoye shosse, Moscow, 117105, Russia
e-mail: lebedev_p_s@mail.ru
ORCID: 0009-0008-7935-3218
SPIN-code: 4821-1689

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