Monday 20 April 2015

Real Estate of Mind: Exploring New York City real estate data




What's this all about?

We've recently bought an apartment here in New York, and it got me thinking a bit about the property market. There are lots of websites like http://streeteasy.com/ for finding properties, and there are of course resources like http://www.nytimes.com/pages/realestate/index.html for reading about the market, but you never really get the full picture all at once.

I was interested in seeing what an entire years worth of residential property sales looks like In New York, and so I went in search of a data source. Fortunaltey New York City is actually really good at making data publicly available through the its open data initiative https://data.cityofnewyork.us/. And I specifically found this site http://www1.nyc.gov/site/finance/taxes/property-rolling-sales-data.page which provides data for EVERY SINGLE PROPERTY SALE in New York City for the last 12 months.




I decided to start with just Manhattan and downloaded the Excel. And it looks like this:


Oh no, stupid Excel format - guess I'll have to edit it before loading into Tableau.....