DIFC (Financial Centre) and Downtown areas apartments analysis.
Problem statement:
It is not straight forward for a newcomer to Dubai to understand how prices are assigned to listings. E.g. at first glance several listings of studio and 1 bedroom apartments in the given two areas of Dubai have approximately same yearly price while square area is quite different. Is studio a good value for its money in comparison to 1 bedroom flat?
Questions to answer:
- How many options by number of bedrooms are there to choose from?
- Do studios, 1 and 2 bedroom flats differ significantly in their square areas and features, what is different about them?
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Data was scraped from Bayut website on August 9, 2022 and saved as .CSV file.
In this dataset we have information about 4800+ apartments available for rent in Downtown and DIFC areas of Dubai in August 2022. Listing have different parameters like:
rental price, address, number of bedrooms, area in sq.ft., description, building info, amenities, etc.
Dataset preview
price - Listed in AED
address - Including the name of the building or/and complex, district, city
beds - Number of bedrooms
baths - Number of bathrooms
area-sqft - Area of the apartment in square feet
description-title - Title of the listing
description - Additional information
reference-no - Reference number on the website
date-added - Publishing date (day, month and year)
balcony-size-sqft - Area of the balcony in square feet
parking - Yes/No
building-info-name - Building name
building-info-floors - Building hight in number of floors
building-info-year - Year when the building was constructed
building-info-area-sqft - Total building area in square feet
furnishing - Furnished/Unfurnished
features-amenities - Additional building/flat features
Dropped columns (click to expand)
These columns were dropped at the beginning of analysis:
apartmet-link-href - unnecessary for analysis
rent-frequency - only Yearly listings were parsed
web-scraper-order - unnecessary for analysis
web-scraper-start-url - unnecessary for analysis
pagination - unnecessary for analysis
apartmet-link - unnecessary for analysis but could be added back later
building - only one name value and the rest is missing values
What was done:
- Many columns contained missing values (e.g. number of bathrooms, balcony size, building info, furnishing, etc.) Some had only a few values missing while others a lot. Thos were either filled or the column was dropped altother as it didn't bring value.
- Data types were changed to decrease memory usage, e.g price and area columns were converted from object (text) to number and date column - from object to date type.
- All columns were renamed and blanks were filled with relevant values.
Below is data analysis using visualization to discover trends and patterns, and validate hypothesises.
Data enrichment step here is to append or enhance collected data with relevant context obtained from other columns.
Address - column containing listing address was split into columns: city, area, building name and tower complex name.
Date - column split into Year, Month, Day and Weekday.
Price per square foot - calculated from listing rental price divided by the area.
Text containing listing title, description and features/amenities contains keywords some of which were converted into new features:
Chiller - assigned 1 when chiller is free, 0 otherwise. Same for Parking and Bills.
Number of unique values per feature
On the diagram above some columns have a high number of unique values ex. 759 options for area in sqrt while others have much fewer variations ex. chiller free Yes/No
Prices range:
- start at minimum of 40,000 AED
- and goes up to 3,000,000 AED,
- with median value of 180,000 AED.
Prices for all listings
Outliers start from price 500,000 and spread up to 3,000,000. Most likely it's a huge apartment with many rooms and that is more luxurious or it's an error.
Log scaled prices
Logarithmically scaled prices display data over a very wide range of values in a compact way.
Prices up to 700,000
Look into most common range of prices for every number of bedrooms shows that majority of all listings are between 90,000 and 300,000 AED. With a very noticeable spike for one bedroom apartments at approximately 100,000 AED. This means with budget of 100k there's a much higher number of one bedroom options to choose from than with budget even 5k lower. Also adding nother 5k would not increase number of options much.
Prices boxplot
Boxplot demonstrates spread and skewness of rental prices by number of bedrooms. This diagram indicates variability outside of the upper and lower quartiles.
One very noticeable thing is that four-bedroom apartments not only have huge interquartile range, but also very long whiskers on both sides, where left whisker overlaps with median price of three-bedroom listings. This could be another error, possibly smaller total area or a building on the edge of the district.
Interestingly interquartile range for studios and 1 bedroom apartments is almost the same. Studios prices have nearly symmetrical distribution, while 1 bedroom listings distribution has a heavier right tail. That discovery raises a new question, why rent a studio if it's in the same price range as one bedroom listings? Perhaps those studios has larger areas, are located in more prestigious buildings or are furnished. At teh same time, if lower rental price is a prioriy, rgere are studios to choose from.
Area range:
- start at minimum of 37 sq.ft.,
- and goes up to 6,792 sq.ft.,
- with median value of 1,346 sq.ft.
Area of 37 sq.ft. is obviously an error. Largest areas could be an error too or a misplaced listings that were supposed to be under a commecial category (offices, shops, etc).
Area in sq.ft. up to 4,500
On the diagram above difference in total areas is clearly visible, with just a minor overlap of 1,700-2,000 sq.ft. for 2 and 3 bedroom apartments.
Area of each bedroom boxplot
Even though there're some studios with area above 750 sq.ft., still most of them are well apart from 1 bedroom listings. Interesting fact: areas have less ranges in each category which makes sense - apartments in tall buildings tend to be alike by size and floorplan. Another thing is that areas are much more apart from one another than rental prices which means price heavily depends on additional facts, not square area alone.
After all data preprocessing there're 4,802 listings left:
- Studio: 435
- 1 Bedroom: 1474
- 2 Bedrooms: 1983
- 3 Bedrooms: 832
- 4 Bedrooms: 75
- 5 Bedrooms: 3
Number of bedrooms
TOP-3 most listed options would be 2, 1 and then 3-bedroom apartments respectively.
For further analysis only 1 and 2 bedroom listings will be reviewed.
Earlier, while checking for unique values, 2204 were found in the description and 2219 by the description title. Manual processing would be time consuming, so finding most commonly used words / phrases would be much more efficient. TOP-30 phrases should be enough.
Word cloud for description (left) & description title (right)
There are few common phrases such as Real Estate, Burj Khalifa, Downtown and etc. that should be ignored as they bring no value.
Meanwhile useful phrases like Fully Furnished, Fitted Kitchen, Chiller free, Swimming pool, Bills included etc. may affect prices, so could be useful.
| Prices range | 1 Bedroom | 2 Bedrooms |
|---|---|---|
| Count | 1,474 | 1,983 |
| Min | 59,998 | 76,990 |
| Median | 115,000 | 225,000 |
| Max | 280,000 | 600,000 |
1 & 2 bedroom prices from 60,000 to 450,000
In the most common range of prices from 60,000 to 450,000, 1-bedroom apartments are concentrated between 80,000 and 130,000, where 2-bedrooms are distributed much wider across the range.
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