An analysis inspired by Airbnb data for New York City in 2021.
Overview
NYC is no doubt one of the most glamorous and popular metropolitan cities in the world. It’s also one of the busiest cities all year round. Thanks to the Airbnb data from Inside Airbnb, we’re now able to take a peek of how NYC is hosting its visitors. Airbnb is by no means the only way for tourists to find a place for the night, but the data should be good enough to give us an idea of some of the questions we want to answer here. For example:
“How’s the price different across the 5 boroughs? How much more should you expect to pay if you really want to stay in Manhattan?”
“What time of the year do people usually visit the city?”
“What are the most frequent words hosts like to use when describing their properties in New York?”
We will be going over these above questions together using the listing and review data compiled Apr 07, 2021 on the aforementioned website.
1. What are the differences for listings across counties within NYC?
First let’s take a look at the distribution:
As we can see from the above chart, most listings (> 80%) are in either Manhattan or Brooklyn, which are the two most convenient areas for tourists.
In order to get the most of the city and stay closer to the museums and fancy restaurants, spending the night in the heart of the city would be ideal. So how much more should we expect to pay for that premium? We took the average prices of the listings by both locations and room types. There are more factors to consider when it comes to price, but these 2 dimensions should give us good enough segments for the question we want to answer here. Below is the result:
Not surprisingly, it’s most expensive if you want your own hotel room or apartment in Manhattan but a single room should still be affordable and can be a compromise.
So does the living situation and convenience justify the price premium? Quite the contrary in fact. Overall properties in Manhattan get the lowest ratings among the 5 boroughs. Per my own experience, places in Manhattan can be tiny and street noise can be another problem if it happens to be on a busy street.
2. What time of the year do people usually visit the Big Apple?
From the Airbnb data we cannot really know when exactly did people visit the city. But assuming that people usually comment or review their experience soon after their trip, we can use the time of the reviews as a proxy to answer the question.
First let’s do a simple line chart to see the general trend:
This is clearly not the best visualization but we can still see the upward trend and seasonality especially for the recent years. Let’s separate the general trend and seasonality to take a closer look in the next step. And we are only doing it using the most recent data of 2014–2019. We are excluding 2020 and beyond for obvious reasons.
To remove the fluctuation, let’s smooth it out by using a rolling window of a year and look at the average number, which can be nicely fitted with a quadratic polynomial:
To look at the seasonality, we first sum up the total reviews for each month, then divide them by the number of the whole year to see how much each month is taking up. Here’s what we see:
In general, visitor volume is the lowest in February, then starts to increase till May, where we can see a small peak here for the first half of the year. Then the number decreases a little for the next two months, and starts to climb again and reach the highest in September and October. The number goes down a little as the holiday season comes. January and February are usually the lowest. January number is always higher than February probably because we are using the number of the reviews and some people just submitted theirs a few days after their Christmas visit.
3. How do people usually describe their properties in NYC?
The caption shows what the host really wants to emphasize for the place they are listing. Here we use the pos_tag() function in the NLTK package to parse the name they’re using in order to get a flavor of what people want to promote most.
To make the results more meaningful, we filtered down to only nouns and adjectives, and also removed very frequent but not value-added words like ‘room’ or ‘apartment’. Below are the top 30 most frequent words we found:
As expected, words like ‘spacious’ and ‘large’ are among the top ones as places in New York are known for their limited sizes. And ‘studio’ is among the top ones. We should probably remove it together with words like ‘room’ but it usually indicates the size of the apartment which is interesting to me. Not sure if we also get a lot of those in other cities as well. Also, a few words for locations are frequently mentioned as well which makes sense as that’s one of the most important pieces of information a renter will be looking for on the website.
These findings would be more interesting if we can use the same data for another city for comparison.
Conclusion
In this article, we took a look at the Airbnb data for listings and reviews:
- Most of the Airbnb listings in NYC are in Manhattan. You’ll need to pay for the premium if you want to enjoy the convenience. But be aware, the experience might not be as nice as expected.
- Most visitors come to the Big Apple in September or October. If there’s some flexibility in your plan, come in January or February, as it should be less crowded and therefore cheaper.
- People tend to emphasize the spaciousness and location of their properties in NYC. However, manage your expectation as the reference is other NYC apartments :)
The findings here are observational, not the result of a formal study. Have you visited NYC before? How do you feel about the living situation there?
To see more about this analysis, see the link to my Github available here.
