How is the data in [Median Rent] sheet calculated? Is it taking the median across all unit sizes? Where is Mr. Meyer getting this data? The two [Median rent by Bedrooms] and [Median rent by Bedrooms YoY] sheets have this formatting which makes it very hard to slice and dice the data. The city column ('A') has merged cells for each city for each bedroom size, making it impossible to create visuals or even a pivot table. Suppose, for example, I only want to look at 2BR's within all CA markets. Can't do it with a pivot table, AFAICT. Or if I want to compare the growth trends of 1BR in multiple markets. Can't do that, either. This is why merged cells is a bad practice for data dumps like this. There should instead be a city for _every single_ bedroom instead of 1 city cell for all three bedroom size, effectively flattening this table. While merged cells like this might make it more readable in _this_ workbook, it's not that relevant when you consider that this file is more a data dump than an actual analysis workbook. In fact, it's a safe bet most folks have built an ETL pipeline to refresh their own analysis workbooks with every refresh here. Giving this 1 star because it's not very useful in its current format and it would be a lot of work for me to fix it in order to get much use out of it.

Jeff King | over 1 year ago