Seattle housing, graphs and table, statistic

Submitting your graphs and descriptive tables early is now optional.  If you want to make sure that you are obtaining the correct information or need the extra help with pivot tables and summaries in Excel, then definitely make sure you submit them early.  This will no longer be a mandatory component of the grade.  Be advised, however, that the actual Memo 1.2 Write Up will assume that you (a) know how to create summary tables and graphs in excel and (b) can interpret them accurately.

Assignment Details

You have access to housing market sales data from the King County Assessor’s office from 2000, 2010, and 2019.   Because the original dataset is so large, we will be working with 500 randomly sampled observations from each year (so, 1,500 observations total). 

This data contains not only the final sale price of the house, but also a myriad of other characteristics that inform our understanding of that value (e.g. square footage, number of bedrooms, neighborhood).  The final deliverable for this assignment is a concise memo that appropriately analyzes this data over time. The first part of the Memo consists solely of your statistical analysis; there is no writing/interpretation involved with this component of the assignment. 

Part I - Statistical Tables and Data Visualizations

Create a variable that represents price per square foot.  For the entire city over the full time period, use Microsoft Excel to generate descriptive statistics for two separate outcome variables: (1) sales price and (2) price per square foot.  Round your statistics to the nearest tenth.  

Next sort the data by the year the property was sold.  Then generate the same statistics for each year separately (2000, 2010, and 2019).  Finally, create and present appropriate graphs to illustrate changes in median home price over time.

In a Microsoft Word document, create two tables – one for the full time period and one for the annual statistics -- and present appropriate descriptive statistics.  Provide appropriate titles for your tables. Be sure to indicate the sample size for the full sample (Table 1) and for each year (Table 2).  For an example of a good descriptive statistics table, please see Table 1b (Links to an external site.).  This table is meant as a rough guide; you may decide to format your table in any way that makes sense.

Also include in this Word document one to two appropriate data visualizations (i.e. graphs) that tell a story about the data.