Barcelona Property Market Analysis: Is the bar on the corner affecting property prices?

As I started work on this project, which was originally for a IBM Professional Data Science Certificate, I really wanted to produce some finding which would actually be useful in the real world. The course had examples of imagining that you were wanting to open a new coffee shop in a city you didn’t know – how could you decide where would be best. Sure, that might be helpful to anyone who’s thinking of opening a coffee shop in a city they don’t know – but really I thought that I could do better. What if I could augment the venue data with property prices for each area, what could that help me tell. My wife and I have been thinking to buy a place for a while now, and so could this help?.

Our personal preferences

When thinking about the places that we’d like to have near us, these were the things we felt would make the biggest difference on a daily/weekly basis. Feel free to skip ahead to get to the data part!

Nice Coffee

As a professional coffee addict trying to move from (a large) quantity of coffee, to perhaps even a single high quality cup of coffee a day, this is much easier with options where the coffee shop is roasting their own beans, or taking more care over the process.

Brunch Places

Early on in our relationship, we decided that satisfying my love of eggs benedict would be better served by finding nice brunch places ratyer than my darling wife spending any of her weekend slaving over a hot bain marie making hollendaise sauce.

Juice Bar

Eating healthily can be really hard, especially in these hectic and busy times. Much easier just to continue to eat your normal diet and then have a healthy smoothy to atone for all your sins and instantly become a healthy person!

Yoga Studios

My wife is a big fan of yoga, and has practiced it at home whereever we’ve lived, however having organised places around can make things a lot easier. Obviously the above is not a yoga studio but is the best we’ve found near where we live.

Looking through these proferences makes me feel like we’re exactly the same as all the other Guiris (foreign immigrants) here! But what do our preferences mean for property prices?

Where to get the data?

Barcelona is generally very good about access to data. The town council has been running an Open Data project, which currently has over 470 different datasets available. They have a few different data sets, however I chose to use a dataset provided by the property website Idealista (one of the best property websites I’ve ever used anywhere in the world). It gave the data down to a neighbourhood level and as a price per m2.

The course gave sample code which could get a sample of venues in a particular radius from Foursquare. (which interestingly has pivotted from focusing on “checkins” on their app, which seems kind of dated now, to being a leading data provider of this sort of information). I had to do quite a bit of work to extend this to allow me to overcome the new limits Foursquare place on the number of results available at a time, and also to allow me to precisely place each venue within it’s specific neighbourhood and sub-neighbourhood.

First I needed all of the venues in the whole of Barcelona (a process that took over a day to complete sucessfully and then I realised that I’d made a mistake with my coding, and had actually just repulled a single district 50 times rather than 50 different districts). Then I can summerize them by neighbourhood.