ISSS608 2016-17 T1 Assign1 Ho Li Chin

Abstract

Singapore’s public housing system has been cited as a critical part in Singapore’s development landscape. Today, public housing is home to more than 80% of Singapore’s population. For the young couple who wish to start a family, instead of long waiting for new HDB flat to be ready, or some prefers to stay close to their parents’ home, resale public housing has become a good choice for their dream home.

In this Assignment, data visualization will be used to gain some insights regarding the resale public housing market in Singapore. The analysis will focus on some common questions one would usually ask before deciding to buy resale housing for home. The questions include where to buy, price range, flat type, flat size and so on. The dataset that used in this Assignment is the Resale Flat prices records from March 2012 to Jun 2016 took from data.gov.sg.

Problem and Motivation

Buying a house is an expensive investment in Singapore. Most of us want to get the best deal when purchasing a house. The typical questions are categorized into 3 macro areas to address most of the buyers’ concerns before making an informed decision.
1) Is Resale purchase the better option? - Resale transaction over years, is there a trend on peak year? - Resale Price Index

2) Affordability vs Location - Which area(s) sell best (based on transaction volume) - Which area(s) is the cheapest HDB Town (based on resale price) - Which area(s) is the most expensive HDB town (based on resale price)

3) What type of resale HDB house to buy? - What type of flat to buy? 3-Room, 4-Room etc? - Age of the flat - Should I buy a small unit or bigger unit? - Should I buy a high floor unit?

Approaches

For the purpose to help the potential resale flat buyers, different visualization charts such as Bar Chart, Pareto Chart, histogram, time series analysis and box-and-whisker plot were used in this assignment.

Data Preparation

1) Is resale purchase a better option?

Firstly, let’s take a zoom out view on the shares of the resale public housing applications in Singapore.

• C1.png\ Chart 1
• 

  Chart 2

• 

  Chart 3

Number of HDB resale flat transactions have been stabilized from year 2013 to 2015, after a significant drop of about 28% from 2012 to 2013. As can be seen in the chart 3, Singapore HDB resale price index have dropped from 148.6 in 1Q2013 to 134.8 in 3Q2015. One point to note is that the price index has almost doubled from 2006 to 2013 which was probably due to the insufficient supply of new flats during that period. Since then, the government has been busy adjusting various housing cooling policies to address the public dissatisfaction due to the hike in housing price. The effect of cooling measures seems to take effect in for resale market from 2013. Let’s hope that prices won’t rise again too much.