Mumbai, Chandigarh in top 20 least happy cities in the world to buy a home; Details inside

By Team Newsable  |  First Published Oct 14, 2021, 3:42 PM IST

A study conducted by the UK business Online Mortgage Advisor showed the 'happiest' and 'unhappiest' areas to buy a home. They utilised Artificial Intelligence to scan the faces of Instagram users who used the hashtags #selfie and #newhomeowner in their photographs.


Mumbai is already notorious for its exorbitant real estate costs, and it now appears that the Maximum City is the most unappealing city in the world to purchase a property. A study conducted by the UK business Online Mortgage Advisor showed the 'happiest' and 'unhappiest' areas to buy a home. They utilised Artificial Intelligence to scan the faces of Instagram users who used the hashtags #selfie and #newhomeowner in their photographs.

Researchers claimed in the study that they began by looking through hundreds of thousands of geotagged Instagram photos worldwide to determine how the satisfaction levels of the ordinary Instagram user compared to those who had just acquired a house. They then utilised an AI facial recognition technology to determine the most prominent emotions expressed in each photo's face. Happiness was discovered to be the dominating emotion in an astounding 83 per cent of recent homebuyers' photographs examined.

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The business identified the 'top 20 least happy cities in the world to purchase a property based on the percentage difference between the average happiness level of homebuyer postings in each location and the average worldwide happiness level of homebuyer posts. Apart from Mumbai, which is ranked first, Gujarat's Surat is ranked fifth on the list. Other cities on the list include Atlanta, Georgia, and Naples, Italy.

The report goes on to explain the methodology: "Every photo in our research was scanned with the Microsoft Azure face recognition technology." Microsoft Azure analyses clear photographs of people's faces and automatically assigns a score based on the various emotions' intensity. The observable emotions are anger, disdain, disgust, fear, happiness, sorrow, surprise, and neutrality. We grouped the negative emotions (anger, contempt, disgust, fear, and sorrow) into one category ('negative') for the sake of our analysis."

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The company has created a list of the "happiest cities in the world to buy a property." Surprisingly, five Indian towns make a list, with Chandigarh leading the way in fifth place. Jaipur (10), Chennai (13), Indore (17), and Lucknow (20) are the other Indian cities listed.

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