Boston Airbnb Exploratory Data Analysis
Where should you host an Airbnb in Boston?
Long story short, imagine there is a housing company that wants to invest their money to become a host in Boston Area and make a listing in Airbnb. Let’s say the budget is not an issue and they wish to make a lot of income out of their investment.
Thus, these were three important business questions I decided to explore in this dataset, to help me come up with some answers.
- Which neighborhood would make the most profit?
- What are the most profitable criteria for housing?
- How would our profit change throughout the year and how it will impact specific neighborhoods?
Data Overview
Throughout this analysis, we will use the Boston Airbnb dataset that you can find here in Kaggle. Overall, this dataset consists of two files: Listings and Calendar.
The listings dataset contains a detailed description of each listing, including the listing name, host, price, neighborhood, property type, room type, availability, etc. Then, the calendar dataset contains availability data and the price of a listing throughout the year.
Before we move into the analysis, I decided to remove some listings with prices above $500. The price between $0 — $500 should be reasonable for a night. Based on the boxplot below, prices above the ~$500 are all outliers. Moreover, based on the histogram, the prices of most listings ranged from $0 to $200.
To sum up, rows in the listings table that have a price above $500 are dropped.
Q1. Which neighborhood would make the most profit?
As we can see in the bar charts below, Jamaica Plain is a neighborhood with the most listings with around 340, followed by South End and Back Bay with around 320 and 300, respectively. Bay Village, Longwood Medical Area, and Leather District are the neighborhood with the least number of listings with figures below 25.
In the terms of average price, Bay Village has the highest average price among other neighborhoods with figures around $275. However, this number is not too far from Leather District and South Boston Waterfront with figures around $250 both. On the other hand, neighborhoods in the bottom three of average prices are Dorchester, Hyde Park, and Mattapan with figures under $100.
If we look closely, Bay Village has very few listings in its neighborhood, but its average price is the highest compared to other neighborhoods. Perhaps it is because the region of this neighborhood is very small yet luxurious so the average price is spiked. Another neighborhood that caught my interest is Back Bay. It has many listings yet the average price is quite high too.
I believe this fact will be good to consider for further analysis.
Q2. What are the most profitable criteria for housing?
I decided to pick two housing criteria for this analysis: property type and room type.
The property type for listing in Boston that is mostly used is apartments with figures above 2500 listings. This number is five times larger compared to listings using houses, with only slightly above 500. Condominium type listings only account for about half of the house types, around 250. The number of listings with other types of property is only below that of condominiums.
If we look at the price for each property type, the house has the lowest average price, below $100. On the other hand, the apartment has an average price of around $150. Lastly, the condominium has an average price slightly above the apartment.
Then, for the room type, more than 2000 listings offer an entire home/apartment with the highest average price of $200. Furthermore, around 1375 listings are in form of a private room with an average price of a little below $100. Lastly, less than 100 listings used shared rooms with an average price of around $50.
Q3. How would our profit change throughout the year and how it will impact specific neighborhoods?
As we can see in the line graphs below, the average price fluctuated from September 2016 to September 2017 period. The average price started high in September 2016, then declined until the new year 2017. In January-April 2017, the average price was fluctuated around 180 USD, then gradually increased to 200 USD in September 2017.
Moreover, if we look closely at our trend visualization, the graph spiked every weekend. It means that some hosts increased their listings price on the weekend because they expect more visitors to come on the holiday.
Then, I made a graph about the average price trend throughout the year of the top four neighborhoods that have the highest number of listings. Back Bay had the highest average price among the neighborhood with the highest number of listings, fluctuating from around $250 to $350. On the other hand, Jamaica Plain has the lowest average price of around $150.
Conclusion
In this humble data analysis, we can try to conclude several things.
Firstly, there will be several considerations before we finally decide on which neighborhood we should make a listing. A neighborhood that already has so many listings will be tough in the terms of competition. However, with a reasonable and sweet price, we could get a lot of income from our listings. On the other hand, there are several regions that do not have many listings in them, whether because of the area itself that is small or some other reasons. It could be an opportunity since the listing option is not that much.
Secondly, in the terms of property type, it seems that an apartment will be the best option for listings since the price is quite high and many hosts seem to be using it. However, houses and condominiums could be an alternative too because it offers different vibes from the state-of-the-art property type, the apartment. The difference in average price among those three types is not quite far too, so we can go with those three.
For the room type, entire home or apartment listings will be a nice choice. The host could set a rather high price for the listing, but you clearly should own a property like a house or an apartment.
Lastly, the average price trend throughout the year depends on the neighborhood of listings. And, we can expect our income would spike every weekend, and rise more during the holiday season.
Closing
Thank you Airbnb for the datasets, and also for Udacity for the amazing courses. If you (reader) have any feedback for me, just hit me up or just lay a comment. I will highly appreciate it. Moreover, here is the notebook and documentation of my analysis.
Last but not least, let’s learn together!
