Roughly a month of apartment data scraped from various Equity Residential sites
Dataset Description
Context
This data contains roughly a month of data from apartment buildings all across America owned by Equity Residential. My original goal for this project was to try to reverse engineer the algorithm that changed apartment prices daily. To that end, this dataset contains some useful features such as apartment vacancy that, at least to my knowledge, weren't present on other datasets.
This was my first web scraping project so it's a little rough around the edges. In the future I hope to restart this project but for now this is all I have. Enjoy!
Content
This dataset contains apartment data starting from June 25th 2021 to July 17th 2021. The data started with only one apartment in DC, and then branched out to include every apartment complex owned by Equity Residential. It includes data such as daily rental price, bedrooms, bathrooms, location, apartment amenities, apartment vacancy rate, day recorded, and move in date.
Acknowledgements
A special thanks to Professor Joel Davis at the University of Florida who gave me the idea to scrape all these different apartment buildings.
Inspiration
It would be neat if someone more talented than me was able to explain the fluctuations in apartment price.
Disclaimers
Due to this being my first introduction to web scraping, some key fields are missing. For instance, high vacancy apartment were more likely to offer first month free rent, or other promotions. However, I was never able to record this information. Also, halfway through this project Equity Residential changed their website design which broke my scraper, leading to gaps in the data. Finally, in the beginning this was a manual scraping project so that's why the quality of the data drops off as you get closer to June 25th.
