Price : Rent

With rising house prices, is it a better investment to rent or purchase a home? Through data analysis of house and rent prices, we reveal whether the housing market is in a bubble.

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Inspiration

With Canada's skyrocketing housing costs, it seems that our housing market is in an ever-expanding bubble. We wanted to explore this issue using the Price-to-Rent ratio in order to examine whether it was better to rent or purchase a home in different cities across the entire country.

What it does

We have a select region of cities in Canada where we scrape the rental prices and home prices in that region. Plugging median prices into the Price-to-Rent formula, we can determine whether a specific housing market is in a bubble--and therefore better to rent for now--or whether it is a better idea to purchase a home, instead.

How we built it

We used HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Font Awesome, and Axios for the front-end. We powered our web server with Python using the FastAPI framework. A real-time data endpoint is provided by our server to get up-to-date information about purchase and rental prices in the market. The endpoint used requests library to fetch data from online sources including json API as well as HTML pages, and used beautiful-soup to parse out data from response, and returned aggregated results.

Challenges we ran into

Since many real estate websites had dynamically generated information, we couldn't scrape it with beautiful-soup. Instead, we were able to reverse engineer the api for one of the real-estate websites, and we were able to find an alternative website that did have static HTML which allowed for the use of beautiful-soup.

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