House Price Regression: Vermont South, Melbourne

While looking for a house I maintained statistics on the main suburbs we were visiting, and more specifically, on the houses we looked at.

Each house we visited was about 4 bed rooms and generally had the same kinds of attributes - attributes we thought we wanted in a house. For each house we visited, I recorded the address, size of land in square meters, date of sale, sale type (auction, private), asking price, sale price, and other assorted details. An additional contrived measure was the driving distance to main shops reported by Google Maps, in kilometers.

I also supplemented the dataset with additional matching houses in the area when data was available. I found prices were sometimes available from the auction results, although in other cases I had to call to find out, and.or scourer the web.

Rather than let this information go to waste, I thought I would share some of the collected data. This post provides data I collected for the Melbourne suburb of Vermont South.

The following graph simply shows sale price by date, quite boring.

The following graph shows the sale price by land size in square meters.

The following graph shows the sale price by distance to a specific set of shops in kilometers.

I found the data generally useful for plugging in new places and using simple linear regression to help answer questions about expected price at auction or private sale.

Some of this data may be available for purchase from various retail data providers, but I found collecting and entering the data myself made it a lot more personal and gave me some additional focus when inspecting properties and talking to agents about trends.