Presentation Transcript

1. Homes Across the Country Analysis of Home Listings and Descriptions from Zillow.com
2. Madeline Smith, Jin Zhao & Sneha K. December 1, 2011 INFO 6307, Learning From Web Data Fall 2011, Professor Dan Cosley
3. Research Questions How do people describe their homes? Does Length of ownership affect description? Do descriptions vary between geograpic locations?
4. Home Descriptions We wanted to explore words people use to describe their homes and understand it in relation to listing details such as house size, year built and location. We looked at words in the context it appeared.We looked at words within the context of the descriptions from various cities.We did this forthree cities in relation to New York City.
5. 1 Words in context Understand the words in Context. Here is an example word: Large.
6. 2 Percentage of Descriptions Containing “large” New York: sun-filled apartment in the midtown manhattan in clinton, hell's kitchen. southern exposure. 1 large bedroom (12'x16') and large living room.size: 663 sft. Des Moines: cozy 2 bedroom house in nice neighbourhood. a large 3rd non-conforming bedroom with walk-in-closet in the basement along with a 2nd family/living room size: 751 sft. Dallas: gorgeous upscale townhome located in wonderful gated community completely updated with designer paint, hardwoods in large master, travertine in master bath with soaking…. size: 897 sft. Miami: large open plan. large bedroom with hugh walk in closet. linen closet. large bathroom with sink and tub area updated 2004…. size: 755 sft. Philadelphia: spacious studio condo with large walk-in closet that plays like a one bedroom. this high floor unit has an eastern exposure and stunning center city views…beautiful hardwood floors…. size: 608 sft The callouts are home descriptions from New York, Des Moines, Philadelphia, Miami and Dallas. These cities were chosen for their unique percentage of descriptions using the word “large” in their description.
7. 3 New York, Des Moines, Philadelphia, Miami Of the 157 listings, Philadelphia 8% used large in their description. Of 107 listings, New York had 38.3% used large in their description. Of the 168 listings, Philadelphia 32% used large in their description. Of 107 listings, New York had 38.3% used large in their description. Of 55 listings. Des Moines had 38% used “large” in their description. Of 107 listings, New York had 38.3% used large in their description. The graphs above show the avgerage size of homes whose description contains the word large.
8. Where did our data come from? What data? Our data came from nearly 25,000 U.S. home listings from over 1000 cities across 37 states. Nearly 40% of these listings contain text descriptions. Madeline Smith, Jin Zhao & Sneha K. Madeline Smith, Jin Zhao & Sneha K. Madeline Smith, Jin Zhao & Sneha K. Madeline Smith, Jin Zhao & Sneha K. Madeline Smith, Jin Zhao & Sneha K. Zillow.com is a large online real estate portal designed to help people find and share vital information about real estate.
9. Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), a text analysis software program, is used to detect the linguistic traits in the descriptions. Some other tools including JMP, SPSS, excel are used to do statistic analysis. How we got the data? The program is written in Python 2.7, using the official API by Zillow.com. It takes zipcodes as input, then search for homes in or close to those regions the zipcodes represent. The homes are unique identified on the website by an identity: zpid. The program then makes another two API calls according to each zpid, and get detailed data of each home in xml forms. The xmls are parsed by a third party library Beautifulsoup, and the juicyfields are saved to an excel file. How we analyze the data?
10. Length of Descriptions
11. The gross average length of description is 365.713, SD is 352.857.The top three* longest descriptions come from Ithaca NY, Vancouver WA and Wilmington OH. Colored dots on the map show the average description length for each cities. * from picked cities Differences by cities LIWC shows descriptions to be closest to Science Articles. But people in different cities still reveal their life and characteristics in the writing. Among 15 cities we explored, New York City, Ithaca, Denver, & Portland were particularly different and interseting.
12. Continued Analysis We are considering a number of ways to further analyze our data and continue exploring this research question, such as: urban vs. suburban & rural home listings homes listbe by owner vs. those listed by an agent We also intend to explore the literature in realted areas and explore how our findings relate to this existing work. Future Work Although we have nearly 25,000 listings, they are mostly from large cities. It would be interesting to pull more data from a wider variety of locations. Also, listings might be different during different times of the year. It would be interesting to compare international real estate markets as well.
13. Length of Ownership The number of years since the home had last been sold seems to impact a number of things: Also, the value decreased as the number of years increased. Most of the listings we have had last been sold within 10 years.
14. More positive emotional words were used in descriptions of homes that had not been sold for a long period of time than those that had changed owners more recently. Also, more words associated with family and friends were used to describe homes that had been with the same owners for longer periods of time.