Group01 Proposal
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Contents
Overview
Hawker centres are a staple in the Singapore food scene. In July 2018, there was a bid of $10,028 monthly rental for a drinks stall at Chomp Chomp Food Centre. [1]. The hawker in question has since ended the tenancy agreement, but this has led us to wonder: do hawkers know what is the market rate for hawker stalls and do they know how much to bid? NEA manages and regulates 114 public hawker centres in Singapore. Every month, NEA puts up vacant stalls at various hawker centres for tender, which are then awarded to the highest bidders. Aspiring hawkers will need to submit a tender bid for a selected stall. If they are the winning bidder, they have a license to operate the stall for 3 years, after which they may need to renew or bid for a stall again. Bidders who fail to sign the Tenancy Agreement after being awarded the stall will have their deposit forfeited and be debarred from participating in all future government tenders. Therefore, it is important for bidders to know what is a ‘fair’ market rate to pay for their stall, as well as what is sustainable for their business.
Project Objectives
Although information on past rentals are publicly available on NEA’s website, it is not in a form that is easily accessible to users. Our project aims to understand hawker centre rentals by visualising the rental price trends of different hawker centres, and to analyse the factors that affect stall rentals.
Our group aims to build an app to allow users to explore Singapore’s public hawker centre rental data. Users will be able to view price trends, and lookup prices of hawker stall rentals in the selected hawker centre. Users may be able to use our app to see if their rental bid price is within the market range for the type of stalls in their desired market.
More advanced users can use our app to view a geo-weighted regression to understand how locations and different variables affect the rental price of the hawker stalls.
The variables include:
- Availability of & proximity to MRT and buses
- Availability of & proximity to car parks
- Proximity to HDB blocks as a proxy for population
- Hawker stall size and type
Critique of Existing Visualisation
| Source | Visualisation | Critique |
|---|---|---|
| SGChart |
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SG Charts shows a visualisation of hawker stall centre rentals from 2012 – mid 2015. It shows a trellis chart of the min, median and max rentals and rental per sqm for 3 main categories of stalls in each hawker centre. Though the chart allows for interactivity in exploration of distribution of rental prices across various categories of stalls and in different unit of measurements, the creator failed to remove missing values in the dataset which results in empty graphs being incorporated into the trellis chart as well. |
| iChef Club |
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iChef Club SG shows a range of rentals and the price trends at selected hawker centres, for cooked food stalls. While the visualisation provides a clear snapshot of popular hawker centres, it does not allow viewer to explore price trends of individual hawker centres across all regions of Singapore. Nonetheless, we have to keep in consideration that the creator meant for the visualisation to be intended for a blog post and interactivity component is not required. |
Data Source and Overview
Our project uses data from published tender notice on the National Environmental Agency 's website as well as information retrieved various publicly available and personal sources. Special credits to Prof. Kam Tin Seong for providing us a list of geocoded HDB postal code as one of the parameters for our project.
The metadata table of our main working file is shown below.
| Column | Description | Example | Data Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| HAWKER_CENTRE | Name of hawker centre | Amoy Street Food Centre | NEA "List Of 5 Highest Tender Bids" |
| STALL_NO | Unit number of stall | 01-66B | NEA "List Of 5 Highest Tender Bids" |
| STALL_AREA | Size of stall (sqm) | 5.65 | NEA "Tender Bids For Hawker Stalls From March 2012 To September 2018" |
| TRADE | Specific type of trade | Vegetables | NEA "List Of 5 Highest Tender Bids" |
| TRADE_GENERIC | Generic type of trade | Fresh Produce | Derived from "Trade" |
| TENDERED_BID | Successful bid price ($) | $2988 | NEA "List Of 5 Highest Tender Bids" |
| AVERAGE_BID_PRICE | Average successful bid price of Hawker Centre ($) | $450 | Derived from "Tendered bid" |
| MONTH | Month of successful bid | Apr | NEA "Tender Bids For Hawker Stalls From March 2012 To September 2018" |
| YEAR | Year of successful bid | 2017 | NEA "Tender Bids For Hawker Stalls From March 2012 To September 2018" |
| DATE | Month and Year of successful bid | Apr-2017 | NEA "Tender Bids For Hawker Stalls From March 2012 To September 2018" |
| TYPE_OF_STALL | Type of business | Market Stalls | NEA website |
| POSTAL CODE | 6 digit zip code representing postal location of hawker centre | 560572 | NEA website |
| LAT | Latitude in 7d.p. | 1.2793399 | Derived from postal code using R |
| LONG | Longitude in 7.d.p | 103.8466525 | Derived from postal code using R |
| BID_PRICE_PER_SQM | Tendered bid price of stall divided by stall size in sqm | 528.85 | Derived from tendered price and store size |
| LAST_RENOVATION | Reopening date after renovation | Feb-2003 | NEA Hawker Centres Upgrading Programme [2] |
| AGE_OF_HAWKER | Number of years past since reopening date | 15.8 | Derived from fraction of year since reopening date |
| TYPE_OF_UPGRADING | Reason for upgrading | Reconfiguration | NEA Hawker Centres Upgrading Programme |
Timeline
Proposed Story Dashboard
Our group aims to create a visual dashboard which allows user to have an appreciation of the rental price trends across different hawker centres in Singapore. Specifically, users will be able to tap onto the functions of the 3 tabs provided to interact with the dataset for an analysis of price movement of various stall profiles across different hawker types with varying proximity to nearby amenities.
Tab 1 - Geographical visualization of hawker centres across Singapore
With reference to our critic on iChefClub's visualization of hawker rental prices across Singapore, we note that it is useful to represent rental prices visually by plotting them onto the map of Singapore. By furthering this concept, we aim to plot the locations of all NEA managed hawker centres onto an interactive leaflet map of Singapore. The map enables user to explore the price movements of cooked food and market stalls in a particular hawker centre of user's choice. By hovering the pointer above the location of the hawker centre, 2 line graphs of average bid price and average bid price per sqm will be automatically generated at the side of the page.
Tab 2 - Exploratory visualization of rental prices
While the first tab allows user to populate time series rental price information of individual hawker centres, our second tab will enable user to explore aggregated information of pricing with reference to age of hawker centre, hawker type and trade across Singapore.
Tools & Packages
- R
- GWModel
- Shiny
- Ggplot
- Leaflet
- Tidyverse
- Readxl
- Scales
- Ggrepel
- Plotly
- Highcharter
- Dygraphs
- RColorBrewer
Members
References
- Brunsdon, C. (2015, August 18). Geographically Weighted Regression. Retrieved from RPubs.
- Brunsdon, C. (2015, Aug 10). Geographically Weighted Summary Statistics. Retrieved from RPubs.
- Dennett, A. (2014, November 17). An Introduction to Geographically Weighted Regression in R. Retrieved from RPubs.
- Gollini, I., Lu, B., Charlton, M., Brunsdon, C., & Harris, P. (2015). GWmodel: An R Package for Exploring Spatial Heterogeneity Using Geographically Weighted Models. JournalofStatisticalSoftware.
- Lu, B. (2018, 08 20). Geographically-Weighted Models. Retrieved from Package GWmodel
- Tender Notices (2018). Retrieved from The National Environmental Agency
