Can we guess the AirBnB home prices in Boston?
A pattern search for AirBnB home prices in Boston infused by raw data.
Introduction
AirBnB is an online rental marketplace with presence in 100,000 cities and about 5.6 million active listings worldwide. It has been successful in building a bridge between renters and tenants which enabled it to build a network of local communities in less than a decade.
The main source of income for AirBnB is from the service fees charged to both guests and hosts. The peer-to-peer business model used by AirBnB has the potential for continued revenue growth.
However, I always wondered how the prices of the AirBnB homes were determined. I am pretty sure most of you guys also had the same question. So, I ventured into the raw data of AirBnB homes in the city of Boston and tried to answer the question.
I used 3 dataset containing the rooms listed for AirBnB renting in Boston from the year 2016 to 2017 along with reviews provided by the guests. The data consisted of a little more than 3500 rooms available for renting during the time period along with few attributes such as the price, review each room received per month, the number of guests and extra guests the rooms can accommodate.
Part I: Is there any visible Price Trend?
The very first observation that I wanted to extract from the dataset was the price trend of AirBnB rooms in Boston. In order to understand the AirBnB room rentals in Boston better I wanted to see the overall price trend over the time period.
As you can see from the graph below that there has been a drastic fall in the overall price of room rentals in Boston from September 2016 to September 2017.
Starting at 240 USD in September 2016 and coming to below 200 USD a year later. The highest average price was in 2016 at slightly above 280 USD. Although, there was a substantial decrease from October 2016 to February 2017, the price experienced a slow increasing trend till September 2017, with a probable seasonal peak in the price for few weeks at the end of April 2017.
Curious to take a closer look at the trend, I wanted to see if there is any specific price trend for AirBnB room rentals for the different days in a week. Surprisingly, the graph below confirms that room rental prices for AirBnB in Boston is different throughout the week.
‘Week Price Trend’ graph provides us a clear picture of how prices of room rentals vary depending on the day of the week. The highest price for room rentals is observed on Fridays and Saturdays at slightly above 200 USD. The lowest price for rooms is on Mondays with the mean price of around 190 USD.
Part II: How does the different attributes relate to the price of AirBnB rooms in Boston?
I was interested in exploring few of the attributes and how they relate to the price. One of the attributes I was interested to explore was the distribution of different room types in the various types of properties listed for the AirBnB rentals in Boston.
The plot below shows us that there are mainly 3 types of rooms offered in 13 different properties for rentals in Boston. The 3 room types are Entire home/apartments, Private room and Shared room. The 13 properties accommodating the AirBnB guests in Boston are the House, Apartment, Condominium, Villa, Bed & Breakfast, Townhouse, Entire Floor, Loft, Guesthouse, Boat, Dorm, Camper/RV and Others.
From the visualization below, we can see that the most available type of room in Boston for AirBnB rental is Entire Home or Apartment represented by the blue dots followed by the Private room represented by the orange dot and the least available option is the Shared room represented by the green dot.
These dots are mostly located in the top 3 property types namely the House, Apartment and Condominium. The least number of rooms to rent in Boston AirBnB are in the Dorms, Guesthouse and Camper/RV. Among these property types, the highest room prices are observed to be located in the House and Apartment for around 1000 USD per night.
A deeper investigation into the price distribution for the different types of room is provided in the graph below. It shows us the mean prices of the 3 types of room. From the graph we can see that the mean price of Entire home/apartments are way higher around 200 USD compared the mean price of the other two types. The price of Private rooms is evenly distributed with the mean price around a little less than 100 USD and the lowest mean price of Shared rooms is located around 50 USD.
Part III: What biased good reviews from the customers?
Finally, I wondered if there might be any attributes which biased good customer reviews. The answer to this question can be explored a bit further with more sophisticated machine learning/ NLP (Natural Language Processing) mechanism to process the reviews in the data.
However, for this dataset I decided to develop Word Clouds. The more times a word appears in text data, the bigger and bolder it appears in the word cloud. Therefore, the word cloud below provided me with an idea about few of the attributes which biased good reviews from customers.
Customers providing good reviews preferred renting apartments and were pleased when provided with many amenities such as shampoo and towels. This goes to show that providing a clean room with amenities and hygienic products will result in good reviews from customers and in return better business from recommendation.
Conclusion
In this article, we looked at the price trend and recommendation of AirBnB rental rooms according to the Boston 2016–2017 AirBnB dataset.
1. We looked at how the overall price of AirBnB rental rooms in Boston from September 2016 to September 2017 experienced a drastic decrease and also how the price for the rooms are higher on Fridays and Saturdays.
2. We then got to see that the most available room type in Boston was Entire house/ apartment followed by Private room in the 13 types of properties. Entire house/ apartment was also had the highest average price and Shared room had the lowest average price among the 3 types of rooms.
3. Finally, we created a simple word cloud which revealed how the customers are pleased with the service of the AirBnB hosts if they are provided with clean rooms along with hygienic amenities such as shampoo and towels.
The findings in this article are observational, not the result of a formal study. So the real question is:
Will similar TREND be seen in other cities too?
To see more about this analysis, see the link to my Github available here.
