The Design of an Online Roommate Finding System for Property Management Portals—the Virtual Community Perspective

With the evolution and diffusion of the internet at the society level, various business sectors have been transformed and redesigned with the new technologies such as enterprise systems, social media, virtual communities, social commerce, and business intelligence. For example, most fortune 500 companies have installed ERP system by 1998 (Magal & Word, 2012), resulting in major manufacturing and traditional businesses to re-design their business processes. The travel industry has been disrupted by the online booking system such as booking.com and TripAdvisor.com (Mellinas, Martínez María-Dolores, & Bernal García, 2015). Many bookshops have been closed because of the operations of online booking stores such as Amazon (Pitt, Berthon, & Berthon, 1999). The emerging smart city research also implies that the transformation by the digital technology is at the national and city level into all sectors including transportation, energy, water etc (Paroutis, Bennett, & Heracleous, 2014). In the property management sector, various property management portals have been established to facilitate the estate agencies to manage properties and the customers to find suitable properties. The typical examples are zoopla.com and rightmove.com, both of which are specialized in one-stop property renting and selling in the United Kingdom. At the same time, there are also many small property management agencies who operate the independent property management platforms.