1. Business Understanding
Airbnb is an online housing platform that help traveler to connect and book homestays from local hosts while help local hosts earn extra money by listing their available space / room for rent. Airbnb was founded in 2017 by Nathan Blecharczyk, Joe Gebbia and Brian Chesky. Eventhough the free listing offer, they still make money from 2 differents sources after every booking is done which are 10% commission from host and 3% transaction fee from the travellers.
2. Data Understanding
a. How Does a Specific Area Affect Boston Airbnb Price
I grouped the data by each neighbourhoods and calculated their average price. Then, I drew out a boxplot to see if there is any relationship or trend between the neighbour area and price.
Eventhough the price if differenr for each neighbourhood, there is no real disstinction within the data set to support a acertain conclusion. I then drew out the Airbnb listings’ exact location as well as neighbourhood estimated location vs the price. (The orange spots are airbnb listing with their exact location while blue spots are neighbour estimated location)
The more dense the distribution of airbnb is, the higher the price.
b. How Does Different Type of House Affect Price ?
However, since there are many different type of house in a certain area, the relationship will be clearer with a house type distribution chart that I drew out below:
The majority of property is apartments (higher price). The corner left area are most likely camper/RV and boat (lower price). It also rule out a business model other than just going to work, which is, base on the scatterplot distribution, people (local host) tends to buy apartments just for rent as another income source.
c. How Does Room Distributed Throughout Boston Area? What Affect Does Room Type Has On Airbnb Price?
At the same time, the price is also affected by the room type. Below is room type histogram. As we can see, majority of airbnb listings are entire home / apartment (~3000 counts) and private room (~1300 counts) while shared room is less than 200 counts.
From the chart, the bigger the house type is, the higher the price. According to the chart, villa and guest house has the highest price exlcuding other since I don’t know exaclty what type of house ‘Other’ is.
d. What Influence Do Accommodations Have On Airbnb Price?
It is clearly to determine that as the accommodations rise, the airbnb rise as well. There is a positive linear relationship between these 2 variables.
e. How Does Price Change Throughout Different Time Frame / Season ?
The total availability tends to rise (900 unoccupied airbnb in September to near 2000 unoccupied airbnb in January) after the holidays season (Thanksgiving, Christmast) period is over. It starts to drop slowly from spring break to summer time and stay flat after that.
Total availability has a inverse relationship with airbnb price, meaning, the more occupied airbnb (espicially during holiday season), the higher the price
Airbnb price is higher during the weekends and lower during the weekdays
3. Machine Learning - Data Training
After cleaning (including dropping unimportant features / columnns), splittinng and fitting a data into regrssion, the coefficients are as follow:
According to the coefficients for each feature above, accommodations including bedrooms, bathrooms have the most influent to the airbnb price. Follow by is the property type and whether or not there is extra fee for having guest over.
4. Conclusion
The number of bedrooms, bathrooms, accommodations plays an important role in determining the airbnb price. Relatively, the higher the number of bedrooms, bathrooms, the bigger the house model. For instance, villa most likely have more rooms than apartment therefore property type is also an important feature.
Weekends always have higher price than weekdays since people travel more during their time off leading to lower airbnb availability and higher airbnb price. It’s also the same with holidays season.
The data not only suggest how to book an affordable airbnb price but also suggest a new source of income for full-time worker, which is, most of the airbnb listing are apartment with private and full apartment rent Meaning, there are local host who bought apartment and use the rent money to pay off morgage / make it their second source of income.