NYC Real Estate Trends
Before and During the Economic Crisis

Project Overview

As the finance capital of the U.S. and arguably the world, New York City has been right at the center of the current economic crisis. Since this "Great Recession" has been so closely tied to the real estate market, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at certain real estate trends in NYC over the past several years. And because we so often associate "New York City" with Manhattan, the wealthiest of five boroughs, I thought splitting the city apart might yield some revealing trends. Perhaps we will find notable differences between how Wall Street and "Main Street" have been affected by the crisis.

Unfortunately, I ran out of time before I could finish implementing the visualization. I was not able to uncover any interesting trends in the data.

Visualization Approach

I discovered this NYC real estate data by browsing the APIs at nytimes.com. One of the APIs, The Real Estate API, listed the New York City Department of Finance as its source of data, so I followed a link to nyc.gov, where I found real estate sales data in spreadsheet format going back to 2003. The sales data is provided for the five boroughs of NYC: The Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island.

Of the available 20 fields, I attempted to visualize four: Borough, Address (geographic location), Sale Price, and Sale Date. I also intended to calculate monthly sale totals and monthly sale price averages and use them in small multiple graphs beneath my main map animation. I had originally planned to use a few more fields, but a closer examination of the data revealed that many sale entries were incomplete (i.e. include only a few fields). Price happened to be one of the more consistently available fields, and it was probably more relevant to the economic crisis, anyway. The full data set had over 200,000 entries, so to narrow the data set, I filtered it down to only single-family home sales. This left me with around 90,000 entries, which still would have been too much to fit on a small static map. Instead of visualizing each individual sale, I intended to display bubbles representing sales per neighborhood per month.

The Implementation

Download or view sketch.jar.

Source code: sketch FloatTable Integrator Map PlayButton Plot Sale Slider Timeline Toggle layout palette

The original mockup:

A screenshot from the incomplete implementation: