In this project, I evaluated the Greater Vancouver housing market. First, I designed two research questions that provide valuable information about the Vancouver housing market to ensure a straight forward analysis.

Research Questions

• Which apartment in what areas can provide low price-to-rent ratios?

I wanted to answer this question because everyone who wants to invest in real estate is looking for apartments that cash flow. Therefore, potential home buyers want to buy apartments at a low price and want to rent them out at a high price.

• Is a house undervalued or overvalued?

Hence, to find housing prices below the market rate, people usually have to know the area inside out. Therefore, to make that information available to anyone, I came up with a regression that takes the input of key characteristics of houses and provides information if this particular house is being sold above or below market rate.

Data Collection

I developed a web scraper that scraped information about housing prices and characteristics from a commercial real estate website and developed a script that puts all information in a tidy data frame.

For housing rent prices and their key information, I used the craigr package, which scraped information from craigslist.

Data Analysis

I grouped apartments in a specific way and calculated price-to-rent ratios to answer the first research question. To answer the second research question, I fit a multiple linear regression model.

• A detailed report is available here.
• If you are interested in my code and the web scraper then please visit my GitHub page.