This project is a study of housing within the last nine months in Northfield, Minnesota. We scraped our data from the website trulia.com, which is part of the same parent company as Zillow.

Overall, there has been a slight upward trend in house prices from August 2020 through May 2021. The mean price of a house in August 2020 was $280,270.50, and in May of 2021, the average house price was $323,638.70. This increase follows the reopening of the housing market after the initial halt at the beginning of the pandemic. The prices of houses dropped closer to the start of the pandemic due to the lack of buyers. Once communities began to open up more, there was an increase in buyers, leading to an increase in selling price.

The companies with the highest number of houses sold overall include Edina Realty Inc., RE/MAX Advantage Plus, Coldwell Banker South Metro. Some companies listed separately are branches of one company. Keller Williams Realty contains several branches such as “Classic”, “Integrity”, “Premier”, and “Select”. Because each branch was listed under a unique name, we have considered them as separate companies in our analysis.

This boxplot shows the distribution of home prices based on the number of bedrooms. The median home price peaks at 5 beds. Notably, however, there are comparatively few homes in the data set with greater than 5 bedrooms. The NA category includes both homes classified as studios, as well as homes for which the number of bedrooms was not immediately available. There are outliers for almost all of the bedroom classifications.

To better understand these homes with higher sale prices, we also looked specifically at the homes that sold for above the average sale price in the dataset. Some factors that can increase the price of the house include the number of bedrooms or bathrooms in the house. Overall, the trends show that the number of bedrooms or bathrooms does not guarantee that a house will sell for more. Within the houses that sold for above the average price of the dataset ($295,301.60), the house with the highest selling point had five bathrooms and four bedrooms, selling for $1.3 million. In comparison, a house with five bedrooms and five bathrooms sold for $570,000. These differences may be accounted for by factors such as house quality, which was not given in the scraped data.

To better understand the behavior of sales within an individual realty company, we looked at homes sold by Edina Realty Inc., the largest seller within this dataset. This graph shows the general trend of the price of 2 or 3 bedroom homes sold by Edina Realty Inc. This company regularly sold the houses across the time frame studied, making it a better gauge of trends over the nine months. Overall, the general increase of price from October to the present follows the trend of decreasing COVID cases in Minnesota.

Finally, this map shows the spatial distribution of homes sold within Northfield during the last nine months. More homes have been sold closer to the city center than towards the outskirts of town where the landscape changes to include more farms and larger plots of land. Also, with regards to price and the number of bedrooms, there doesn’t necessarily seem to be a neighborhood or region in town in which one type of home is more common than another.