🏠 Irish Rent Dataset

Overview

This dataset contains average monthly rent prices across Ireland, sourced from the Residential Tenancies Board (RTB) - the official Irish government body for private rental registrations.

📊 Dataset Statistics

📁 Files

processed/irish_rent_full.csv (50,208 rows)

Complete dataset including aggregated categories ("All bedrooms", "All property types").
Best for: Exploratory data analysis, visualizations, overview statistics

processed/irish_rent_specific.csv (22,484 rows)

Filtered to specific bedroom counts and property types only.
Best for: Machine Learning models, regression, classification tasks

processed/irish_rent_by_county.csv (286 rows)

County-level average rents aggregated over time.
Best for: Time series analysis, regional trend comparisons

🔢 Features

Target Variable

Time Features

Location Features

Property Features

Boolean Flags

🎯 ML Baseline Results

Using the irish_rent_specific.csv dataset with Random Forest Regressor:

Feature Importance

1. is_dublin - 57.67% (Location is key!)
2. bedrooms_encoded - 11.73%
3. property_encoded - 11.23%
4. county_encoded - 11.16%
5. year - 6.49%
6. is_city - 1.12%
7. half - 0.61%

💡 Suggested ML Tasks

1. Rent Price Prediction - Predict rent based on location, property type, bedrooms
2. Time Series Forecasting - Forecast future rent trends by county
3. Regional Analysis - Compare and cluster counties by rent patterns
4. Classification - Predict if a rental is above/below median price
5. Anomaly Detection - Find unusually priced rentals

📈 Key Insights

• 🏙️ Dublin Premium: Dublin rents are ~80% higher than the rest of Ireland
• 📍 Location is Everything: The is_dublin flag alone explains 57% of variance
• 📊 Steady Growth: Rents have increased consistently from 2020-2025
• 🏠 Property Type Matters: Apartments have different pricing than houses

🔗 Data Source

• Provider: Residential Tenancies Board (RTB) Ireland
• Website: https://www.rtb.ie/
• Data Type: Official government statistics on private rental market
• Update Frequency: Half-yearly (H1 = Jan-Jun, H2 = Jul-Dec)

📋 Usage Example

import pandas as pd

## Load the ML-ready dataset
df = pd.read_csv('processed/irish_rent_specific.csv')

## Quick EDA
print(df['rent_euro'].describe())
print(df.groupby('county')['rent_euro'].mean().sort_values(ascending=False))

## Prepare for ML
X = df[['year', 'county', 'property_type', 'bedrooms_num', 'is_dublin']]
y = df['rent_euro']

📜 License

This dataset is derived from publicly available RTB data under Irish Open Data principles.

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