New York City is one the most visited cities in the world, therefore, one of the most expensive ones. Since hotels are not always affordable, AirBnb is becoming more popular every day. AirBnb is an online marketplace for offering lodging and homestays, where people can not only find a room to stay for a night or a month, but also become a host and lease their own place/room to somebody who needs it. There are different rules for each listing. The minimum number of nights for staying varies from 1 to hundreds. Hosts can have one place to list or multiple locations managed under one name. There are three types of rooms that are offered on the website: entire place/apartment, private room or shared room. When you choose room to yourself, you look at the pictures, description and reviews. But I think the most important criteria would be location and the price. Of course, the more space you have for yourself, the more expensive it is going to be. But in New York City the price also depends on the neighborhood and borough. There could be much more expensive shared rooms in Manhattan than private apartments in Queens or Bronx. Let’s us explore the AirBnb data in NYC for 2019 and see what neighborhood has the most expensive listings and what type of rooms is the most popular among NYC hosts.

         This project would be useful for anyone who travels to NYC and wants to rent Airbnb, since it has become very popular for the past few years, and also for the people who are interested in listing their own places.

I downloaded the data from ‪Kaggle.com in CSV file. The data points are Id, Name, Host Id, Host name, neighborhood, neighborhood group (borough), latitude, longitude, room type, price, minimum nights, number of reviews, last review, reviews per month, availability 365. The data includes over 47000 rows back to 2014, so for easier and more relative analysis I filtered the data in Excel by last review, and chose the year of 2019 for my project. The data now consists of a little more than 25000 rows.

I started my analysis by making a map by listing and the average price per night, where the price is filtered by color. When I made the map, I realized that the darkest color falls on one dot at the waterside in Brooklyn, and all other dots have very similar lighter color. After filtering and exploring data, I found out that one out of two listings in Sea Gate (Brooklyn) costs 1485 per night, which makes the average price for neighborhood over $800. Even though there are more expensive listings in NYC (up to few thousand dollars per night), the average price of the neighborhood much lower than $800. The average price per neighborhood without Sea Gate vary from $38 per night up to 396.7$. Since there were only two listings in Sea Gate I made a decision to exclude that neighborhood for better overall picture.

I continued my research by finding the most expensive and the least expensive neighborhoods in New York City by average price in this neighborhood. For the first group, I chose average price per night from $250 to $396.7, where seven the most expensive neighborhoods left. For the second group, I filtered the price from the minimum of $38 up to $50 and got 6 the least expensive neighborhoods. For people who do not know all the names of the neighborhoods I added the name of borough in the tooltip. To show how many hosts there are in NYC I made a chart with Host ID in columns and average price in rows. As much as I would want to see Host Names in the x-axis, there are many listings that have the same first names as a Host Name, so, to see all of them I needed to use Host Id’s.

My research continued with finding the median price for each borough, the number of rooms and the number of room types in each borough. In order to join together this data in one chart, I chose Scatter Plot, where Median Price is on y-axis, boroughs are on x-axis, the number of rooms filtered by size of the circles and room types divided by color. Using the same colors for room types, I decide to make my own mini AirBnb interactive project. By adding search parameters for minimum number of nights for staying and the room type, I created an interactive map, where user can choose the type of room he wants.

By looking at the analysis we can clearly see that the most popular room type for AirBnb in NYC is entire room/apartment. The most expensive areas are Tribeca, Flatiron District, NoHo and SoHo; all of them located in lower Manhattan. If Manhattan has been always the most expensive borough to live in, surprisingly, there are few spots in Staten Island and Rockaway beach that very close to the average Manhattan price. This fact proves one more time that all of us are unique, and as many people in this world as many different tastes they have, including places to stay.