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GIS for Business Projects 2006 – 2007

Geographical and Data Mining Analysis of 1978-2006 Price Changes in the Residential Real Estate Market

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In this project, methods and tools of general statistics, data mining and spatial analysis are applied for analyzing the price changes of real estate market of HRM (Halifax Regional Municipality). The original data is divided into six groups. Except for the first one, each group contains 5-year records of houses being sold. The result of comparing prices of each data group shows that, from year 1978 to year 2006, the housing prices keep rising in HRM. The growth rate of mean prices was about 200% for the first decade (1978-1986). It dropped slightly for the second decade (1987-1996), but revealed a high uptrend in the recent decade (1997-2006). The result of data mining indicates that for the time 1978-1986, the most important housing attributes that determine high price houses are the aesthetic appeal and the number of bathrooms. For the time period 1987-2006, the most important housing attribute for high price houses is the size of living area. The coastal areas of Bedford Basin and Northwest Arm are hot spots with high probability of prices exceeding $150,000 in all time periods. House prices in the downtown area are always higher than those in the rural area. As time goes by, the price difference between these two areas is getting bigger. Spatial analysis indicates that, all the mean centers of prices for each data group are located in the Dartmouth area. And the geographical distances between each pair of centers are not salient. In the time period 1978-1986, more than 30% of houses were sold at similar prices. In the time period 1987-2006 more than 40% of houses were sold at similar prices.