Where to Start with the Apartment Hunt?

I will be moving to Chicago post graduation. A new city means going through all of these apartment websites to try to determine the best place for myself to live. Therefore, I would like to be able to analyze this data in an easy comparable format. Thus, in my analysis I used <www.apartments.com/chicago-il/>.

What’s Next?

I found the website, downloaded the data to put it in a format that was easier to navigate and create visuals.

I create elements and a data frame to have my desired information in one clean spot.I thought it would be nice to choose how many pages of apartments to choose from each time this is run. So, in my cleaning up of my data I also included this element.

Lastly…

I decided to make a data table to start my search just a quick what’s the name of the building, where is it located and how much is it? To me, in the beginning of my search, these were the most important questions to ask.

property_name address min_price max_price
The Residences at NewCity 1457 N Halsted St, Chicago, IL 60642 2246 4199
Elevate 930 W Altgeld St, Chicago, IL 60614 2125 14370
The Pavilion 5441 NE NEast River Rd, Chicago, IL 60656 1195 3190
Regents Park 5035 S East End Ave, Chicago, IL 60615 1575 4748
The Synagogue 5029 N Kenmore Ave, Chicago, IL 60640 1830 1870
Residences at 8 East Huron 8 E Huron St, Chicago, IL 60611 2575 6895
Solstice on the Park 1616 E 56th St, Chicago, IL 60637 2750 7589
Milieu 205 S Peoria, Chicago, IL 60607 2120 4818
The Madison at Racine 1164-1212 W Madison St, Chicago, IL 60607 2846 5612
The Parker Fulton Market 730 W Couch Pl, Chicago, IL 60661 2204 9367
The Ardus 676 N La Salle Dr, Chicago, IL 60654 2480 2560
Gild 1206-1212 N State Pky, Chicago, IL 60610 2260 6322
One Superior Place 1 W Superior St, Chicago, IL 60654 2172 5055
The Lofts at Gin Alley 120 N Green St, Chicago, IL 60607 2815 12682
369 Grand by Onni 369 W Grand Ave, Chicago, IL 60654 2095 79788
Aurelien 833 N Clark St, Chicago, IL 60610 2352 16463
Optima Signature 220 E Illinois St, Chicago, IL 60611 2849 9906
Gateway West Loop 11 S Green St, Chicago, IL 60607 1977 3428
One Chicago 14 W Superior St, Chicago, IL 60654 2284 11620
Union West 939 W Washington Blvd, Chicago, IL 60607 1898 4465
North Water Apartments 340 E North Water St, Chicago, IL 60611 2171 7433
Cloisters 5801-5811 S Dorchester Ave, Chicago, IL 60637 2150 3525
The Kent 2623-2627 N Clark St, Chicago, IL 60614 2200 2450
Coeval 51 E 14th St, Chicago, IL 60605 1780 5045
Aston 200 E Illinois St, Chicago, IL 60611 2329 9314

Above I wanted to find a similar way to just look at address and pricing. Here, I can get a quick overview of what each apartment might look like without the extra stuff.

Here I wanted to see a word graph with the different features available. For instance, if most are pet friendly that is good, because I want a pet friendly place. Also, if there are not a lot of places with washer dryers I know I then need to narrow down my searches.

In this graph, I wanted to see the top five most expensive apartments, so I can take those out of my searches right away.

Above, I wanted to look at the features in a word cloud to see what most apartments have to offer. I want an apartment that is similar to others and giving me the most.

property_name max_price
The Pavilion 3190
The Synagogue 1870
The Ardus 2560
Gateway West Loop 3428
Cloisters 3525
The Kent 2450

Lastly, I wanted to see all apartments that on the maximum cost less than $4000 as I do not want to live in too expensive of a place.

From here it can be seen, that there are lots of apartments in Chicago to sort through when it comes to trying to find which one is best for me.