ISSS608 2016-17 T1 Assign1 XXX

ISSS608 2016-17 T1 Assign1 Wesley Chan

Abstract

Having worked and lived here in Singapore for a few years, my friends and colleagues would always advise me to buy a property here, instead of renting one, as it was in their words a “sure-win” investment, due to growing demand from both Singapore residents and overseas investors, as well as limited land supply in Singapore.

Problem and motivation

Buying a property in Singapore is probably one of the biggest financial decisions that I would make in life, given the high costs of properties in Singapore.
The Housing Development Board (“HDB”) resale market has been in the doldrums for a few years now following the introduction of property cooling measures by the Singapore government viz. the Additional Buyer’s Stamp Duty (“ABSD”) and Total Debt Servicing Ratio (“TDSR”). Public housing prices have, however, showed signs of stabilising lately, with some property analysts calling that prices may have bottomed out in the third quarter of 2015 .
The burning question thus pops up: Is it time to buy now? How do I go about choosing a property? What are the factors that affect property prices in Singapore? It is perhaps opportune, to start monitoring now, with the use of visual analytics.

Tools Used

Microsoft Excel 2013 – for quick data manipulation
Tableau 10.0 – for visualisation and info graphic

Approaches

Although there are lots of press articles and websites like SRX.com.sg (http://www.srx.com.sg/singapore-property-news) for reading on the Singapore property market, you never really get the full picture. Accordingly, I decided to do my own research and found a data set on the HDB resale market on Data.gov.sg, the national data portal of Singapore.
The data set contains public housing resale transacted prices for the period from March 1, 2012 to June 30, 2016, based on the date of registration for the resale transactions. As data prior to March 2012 is compiled on a different basis (i.e. based on the date of approval for the resale transactions), I decided to ignore those data.

• Data collection and cleaning:
  

The housing data for 2015 and 2016 is available at https://data.gov.sg .The data is clean and ready for analysis. It was necessary to format few fields and data types to be ready to use with the tool.

• Understanding the data:
  

The various dimensions used in the data set needs to be recorded. This can be easily achieved with appropriate visualization tools. Then we make a note on the different parameters we wish to study and the suitable graphical representation for each case. For instance, Histograms and Box plots could be used to study the Distribution of continuous data types such as prices.

• Analysis:
  

The data set is imported to the tool and Visual infographics are extracted for each case. With this we note our key observations and compare patterns.