The impact of fake news on the real estate market

摘要

We are living in an extremely globalized and digitalized world where social media represent the core of our existence whether for personal or professional reasons. Social media impact on business in general caught the attention of researchers (Grizane & Jurgelane, 2017) during the last years, especially to measure the impact of their use in business growth, increasing sales and/or customer loyalty. There are more and more studies that focus on the harmful effect of fake news on specific markets, news that may appear easily and are difficult to control. Fake news can affect both the customers and/ or the business depending on the context. The purpose of this study is to identify how are the fake news appearing in a world where access to information is so simple and everybody can check the truthfulness of information and what kind of barriers are used to protect the business from being affected and the customers from being misinformed. Data for this paper are gathered using in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs from real estate businesses. The results show that the level of increasing fake news is affecting the trust building process. Recommendations are put forward for organizations to analyze more user behavior and use it for the decision-making process in order to limit the negative effects of fake news. Also, customers need to learn to identify quality brand communication, pay attention to details and be very precautions while taking decisions based on news that may be fake.