With rising rent rates around the Boston area where I live I’ve been interested in what the change in rents has been over the past few months. Zillow actually makes a fair amount of this data available for CSV download on their website for top cities.
I ended up converting the data to JSON because I didn’t feel like dealing with parsing a CSV, and I also used Python to align zip codes with more specific cities since they’re default descriptors are vague/inaccurate.
It’s impressive what you can do with a few lines of code in Chart.js. The hardest part was probably creating a dynamic color scheme which I was able to do with Palatte.js. It’s a cool library that made it a fair bit easier to actually choose colors.
The actual data looks off to me and I question its validity. It’s not present here, but it reports Medford having higher rent prices than Somerville which doesn’t make much sense. Based on my Craigslist browsing that’s certainly not the case. I’m interested to see if scraping Craigslist for rent data may show different trends. Sounds like my next project.