Visualizing NYC Housing Trends with gganimate in R

StreetEasy, NYC’s leading real estate marketplace, makes some fantastic housing data freely available through its data dashboard. Among the datasets available for download is a monthly breakdown of housing inventory by borough and neighborhood over the last 8 years. In this post I’ll use the gganimate package in R to visualize the ebb and flow of rental housing availability in NYC. If the law of supply and demand holds, this should inform ideal times for apartment hunting.

Rental Inventory Over Time

Let’s first visualize the number of rental units on the market over time by borough. This is a monthly view, from January 2010 – December 2018.

Here we see StreetEasy’s growth as marketplace year over year, together with distinct seasonal variation. Let’s explore seasonality next.

Average Rental Inventory by Month

We’d expect some flavor of seasonality with real estate. In the US it’s estimated that 80% of moves occur between April and September. Let’s see if the same pattern is true in NYC.

Sure enough, we observe a “peak season” with an influx of rental units coming onto the market from May to September, although the trend is strongest in Manhattan.

Rental Inventory in Brooklyn’s Neighborhoods

Finally, let’s visualize how housing availability has fluctuated on StreetEasy’s marketplace in each of Brooklyn’s neighborhoods over time.

Using face_wrap from ggplot2, we can easily observe the trend in each neighborhood simultaneously.

Conclusion & Appendix

Kudos to StreetEasy for making this dataset open to the public. There’s certainly more to explore and analyze in their data dashboard. Also, I find gganimate a really useful addition to any data storyteller’s toolkit, and I hope to find more opportunities to leverage this package in the future. Thanks for reading!

R Script: Link
Data Source: Link [Rental Inventory]

Mapping Scarsdale Real Estate Data with Python

This year my wife and I moved to New York for the start of a new job. Initially overwhelmed by the scope and pace of the NYC housing market, we were given the very generous and unexpected opportunity by a family friend to live in a house north of the city in Westchester County. Built in the early 1930s, the historic home is situated in central Scarsdale, an affluent suburban town known for high-achieving schools and extravagant real estate.

As a graduate student of historic preservation, my wife has been especially enthralled by the rich styles and architecture of the houses within the Scarsdale village limits. Naturally, we frequently discuss and analyze the homes we pass on walks and runs, her comments generally centered around history and architecture, mine on economics and valuation.

Sourcing the Data

Wishing to analyze the houses of Scarsdale in a more systematic way, I began to experiment with the Zillow API. Disappointed by both accessibility and content, I continued to search for a superior data source. Soon after, I discovered a tool developed by the Village of Scarsdale to search property information by road name and wrote a Python script to scrape the data. Curious to know if additional variables were available, I contacted the Scarsdale Village administration and was sent an Excel file with the complete set of residential properties, rich with detail and with few missing values (5,000+ rows, 100+ columns).

The dataset includes the address of each residential property, but for visualization purposes, I needed geographic coordinates (latitude, longitude). Luckily, the Google Maps API provides this exact functionality, known as geocoding. Having some experience with this API, it was simple to write a Python script to retrieve the geographic coordinates for each of the 5,000 properties.

After writing an R script to scrub the data (creating more descriptive variable names, filtering, removing duplicates), I was ready to visualize the real estate data of America’s most affluent town.  You can find both the raw and cleaned datasets here.

Mapping the Data

After considering the many potential ways to map the properties, I settled on three key views: Year Built, Total Assessed Value, and Sales Date.

After some research, I discovered the folium library, which leverages the mapping strengths of the leaflet.js library within the Python ecosystem to provide Tableau-like functionally. The timing was ideal considering my free Tableau college subscription recently expired!

1. Year Built

With (a few) homes built as early as the 1600s and (some) as recently as 2018, this view shows clusters of homes built in similar time periods and paints a picture of development over time.

Here, the color spectrum plots blue for older houses and red for newer houses. Drag to interact with the map and click on a dot to view the address and year built.

Note the layers of development along the Saxon Woods Golf course border and the concentration of older homes in the Greenacres area.

Full Page Map: Link

2. Assessed Value

In this heatmap, the brighter the dot the higher the assessed value. Clicking on a circle reveals the total assessed value for the current tax year as well as the square footage of the home.

Full Page Map: Link

Sales Date

Which neighborhoods are hot on the market? This view maps the data according to sales date, with more recent sales colored in green. No clear trend emerges here, with a fairly equal distribution across the village. Clicking on a dot reveals the latest sales date and the number of years since sale.

Full Page Map: Link

Code Appendix

We’ll now dive into how these maps were created. As usual, we start by calling the necessary libraries. Beyond the essential pandas and numpy libraries, I use folium for map creation and matplotlib.cm for color assignment.

In order to visualize a feature such as assessed value or years since last sales date, I needed to be able to bucket the values and assign each bucket a color.

The function below achieves that need, allowing the user to specify the number of buckets and a color spectrum. BI software such as Tableau replicates this kind of functionality, but with superior algorithms that scale for large datasets.

Finally, below is the framework used to create each of the maps. A dot is created for each of the properties, colored according to the bucket assigned and labeled by year built, total assessed value, square footage, or sales date.

You can find the complete code to replicate these maps here and the dataset here. Thanks for reading!

Scraping Stack Overflow Salaries with Python

I recently discovered a salary calculator on Stack Overflow. The tool takes inputs like role, location, and education and outputs salary predictions at the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile.

Salary Calculator Interface

Based on the results of the annual developer survey, the calculator seems like an interesting way to study the marginal impact of expereince and education on earnings. As a recent undergraduate, I might be interested in understanding the impact of graduate degrees on income potential.

Calculator Output

To extract Data Scientist salary data (or extrapolated data) from the tool, I wrote a Python script using Selenium to loop through 350+ different combinations of location, education and expereince.

Results

There are many reasons to exercise skepticism when analyzing this data, like self-selection bias inherent to surveys. It’s obviously very unlikely that a data scientist responded from each location, education, and experience combination. Even if they did, salaries are likely to vary widely. To strengthen any insight derived from this analysis, I’d also collect data from sources like Glassdoor or Indeed, especially before making any significant education or relocation decisions!

With that long disclaimer in mind, below I visualize the scraped data with an interactive Tableau dashboard. You can filter by years of expereince and location to understand salary levels by education level:

One disappointment I had was realizing that much of the data returned from the calculator was the same across locations. The same salaries were also returned across expereince and education levels for graduate and postgraduate degrees. Despite the data shortcomings, this was an interesting exercise in automating data extract from web forums using Selenium. Thanks for reading!

Appendix

Python Script: Link
R Script: Link
Dataset: Link
Tableau Dashboard: Link

Visualizing Pocket Articles with R

Every day I see dozens of things online I don’t have time to read or view in the moment. With Pocket I save news articles, blog posts, talks, or tutorials for later viewing. Pocket allows me to organize things I’ve saved with tags and eliminates the need to send links to myself or bookmark web pages.

Pocket downloads the content for offline reading and presents the text in a reader mode free of ads. I usually save several articles a day and then read them on my commute home out of the city. Simply said, Pocket is the best way to store and catalog anything you read on your phone or computer.

Over the last 2 years I’ve saved just shy of 2,000 links, encompassing a variety of content. Luckily, Pocket has a handy export interface, generating an HTML file with a list of saved links. In this post I’ll extract insights from these links in R, using link domain and topic frequency to assess my interests.

Getting Started

To start, let’s call the required packages.

As an overview, I use rvest to extract the HTML page content, urltools to transform the links to a working dataset, dplyr to manipulate the data, tidytext to tokenzen the link content, stringr to filter out numbers from the links, and wordcloud2 to visualize the word frequencies.

Next, I import the HTML file and extract the links. The url_parse function easily transforms the list of links into a data frame, with columns like scheme, domain, and path. For example, the Wired article below is broken into scheme (https), domain (www.wired.com), and path (2017/03/russian-hacker-spy-botnet/).

https://www.wired.com/2017/03/russian–hacker-spy-botnet/

Top Domains

Now the fun begins. I’m first interested in knowing which domains I read and save the most. In the snippet below, I group and count by the domain, and select the top 20%.

To visualize the result, I use the wordcloud2 package, developed by Dawei Lang, to create a word cloud.

Looks about what I expected, a good mix of business and technology content sources, such as Wired, Medium, NY Times, and Business Insider. Although I’d like to understand how the content I save has changed over time, the Pocket export doesn’t include a timestamp of when the article was saved.

Topic Frequency

Next up, I take a tidytext approach to the list of link paths to analyze the topics I seem to be interested in. Using the unnest_tokens function, I create a data frame where each row is a word. With anti_join, I quickly remove common “stop” words, such as “the”, “of”, and “to”.

In order to create the word cloud to visualize topic prevalence, I first need to count word frequencies. Here I also removed several “noisy” words common in link paths, such as “click”, “news”, and “comments”.

Data comes out on top! Here technology terms and topics like Python and AI are clearly visible, along with a sprinkling of other interests and hobbies like music (Drake, Spotify).

This was a fun and simple way to implement the principles I’ve learned reading Julia Silge and David Robinson’s book, Text Mining with R.

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