Why do it ?

  • Because Tech is exciting, but unpredictable.
  • A back-up income strategy is needed.
  • For Happy / Early Retirement

Case Study:

  • Buy single family house in expanding job market in South Carolina
  • Be lazy for 10 years and collect rent
  • Check back to see value increase 4x times after 10 years

Factors considered for property investment:

  • Cost of single family house
  • School ratings
  • Job growth
  • Crime rate
  • Cost-to-Rent ratio

Data Sources:

Retrieval Methods:

  • APIs to retrieve data using requests module
  • Web scraping using BeautifulSoup module
  • Converting XML data to python dictionaries using XmlDict module
  • Converting HTML tags into text and selecting data using split function
  • Converting unstructured scraped data using regular expressions
  • Python Pandas for aggregation and clean up of data

Data Summary & Metrics

  • Data retrieved for 407 zip codes in South Carolina state.
  • After cleanup and aggregation, final data set contains data for 206 zip codes
  • Normalization of 'Rent', 'School Ratings', 'Job Growth' & 'Crime Rate' to a factor of '1'
  • Summary metric derived by adding the normalized values

High = Red (GOOD)

Low = Blue (BAD)

Cost of Single Family Home.

  • Cost of single family house increases as we move closer towards the beach
In [4]:
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Cost/Rent Ratio.

  • Rents are higher as we move closer to the coastal area and areas near the capital city Columbia
In [6]:
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Job Rating.

  • More jobs in the areas closer to the coast and border of North Carolina
  • Job growth is pretty consistent towards North-West of South Carolina
In [9]:
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Summary.

  • North-East & North-West of South Carolina are the best places to invest.
In [10]:
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Cost/Rent Ratio v. School Rating--Top Ten.

In [11]:
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Cost/Rent Ratio v. Crime--Worst Ten.

In [12]:
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Out[12]:

Cost/Rent Ratio v. Crime--Best Ten.

In [13]:
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Out[13]:

Cost/Rent Ratio v. Jobs--Top Ten.

In [14]:
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Recommendations for investment:

  • Areas closer to sea coast and towards the border of North Carolina have good scope of investment due to consistent job growth, low crime rate and decent schools.
  • Not recommended to invest in inland areas of South Carolina that are closer to the capital city Columbia.

Limitations / Assumptions :

  • Data collected from single source for the factors to determine investment
  • There may be more factors (like Weather, Transportation corridor, Natural disaters etc.) than what were considered for this analysis
  • During normalization of stats, equal weightage given to all the factors