All Forum Posts by: Scott Dixon

Hey @Karl James 

Hope that everything works out for you, if you get the numbers you listed that would be a heck of a find.  What about looking up the contractors who are building in the subdivision?  Approach them and market your lot for their future projects.

Best of Luck

Scott Dixon 

Hey @Sean T.  

Good question in terms on how I filtered/cleansed the data and with this data set it was small enough that I could basically do a manual check to ensure nothing stood out.  The data quality overall was very high and I didn't have to do too much in terms of cleansing prior to visualizing things.  

With that said in my day job we work with much, much larger data sets and we usually write python code to process all data to ensure everything is within expected ranges prior to doing any visualization of analytics.  If I want to expand this dashboard to many more markets for comparison purposes I will need to write some code to automate the data cleansing.

After taking a look at the data I wouldn't say I have found outliers that have opened my eyes but the ability to look at different areas within Champaign / Urbana and see what residential and commercial development is going on and when it happened is a pretty handy research tool for my market.

Scott Dixon

Hey @Rob Anderson 

Added the additional filter to turn on/off residential and commercial properties.  The link above should take you to the updated Dashboard.   

Central Illinois BP Members,

Think we need to get another Central Illinois BP Member Meetup on the books prior to the close of 2014. We will stick with our normal location of Jupiter's at the Crossing and gather on the East side of the 1st floor between the pool tables and the bar. This will be completely informal which you can come and go as you please for some networking with like-minded REI BP members. If you come a little later we might have a table so take a look around the 1st floor or just ask the hostess and I am sure they can point you in the right direction.

Urbana Savoy Rantoul Danville Mahomet Decatur Bloomington Peoria Tuscola UofI Universityofillinois illini UIUC

@Rob Anderson @Tyler Zindars @Jeremy Lamb @Jerry Dengmanivanh @Account Closed 

Hey @Rob Anderson 

I am actually in the middle of adding that filter to the dashboard now.  You will be able to turn on/off residential and commercial properties to give you a little more capability to slice and dice the data as you please.  I will let you know when the addition is made but the link should be the same and will include all the updates. You are correct that the Carle Hospital addition in 2011 really skews the data for Urbana without that project 2011 investment in Urbana would have been minimal.

Scott Dixon

Hey @Chris Feig 

Welcome to BP, there is a ton of great information and people always willing to help.  Are you planning on investing in the Centralia area or do you have another market of focus?  Looking for to start with a single family or smaller multi (2-4 units)?  

Best of luck,

Scott Dixon

@Jonathan Cope 

Thanks for the information and I have been looking around the Tableau Public Gallery and you are right there are a ton of real estate focused examples.  I am sure Zillow has some big things planned for the coming years in terms of what they can do with their data sets.  I am going to push to get to a data analytics summit in 2015 to help expand my view on what is being done in real estate and other sectors, any good summits/conferences which you know are on the calendar for 2015 and would recommend?

@Sean T. 

Thanks for your willingness to help and any information you can provide would be much appreciated.  I am going to keep working to expand my data set but since I currently don't have a web crawler or web scraping script implemented it is still a very manual process.

-Scott Dixon

Hey @Sean T. 

I will dig a bit and see if I can get my hands on a larger data set for the building permit data but from what I saw with the 3 cities I went to the data was not online.  It took a few trips and conversations to have the cities pull the files and send them over to me.  Do you specifically have any experience with large data sets for building permit data (Date, Address, Project Cost, Type of Improvement)?

Thanks for the help!

Scott Dixon

Has anyone worked with taking a real estate data set such as building permits, real estate sales, etc. and used a Big Data too like Tableau to visualize the data?  I have started to look at my local market to see what take aways I can gather about Real Estate Investing from 2004-2014.  Since my data set is just the Champaign / Urbana area in Illinois  I can't make many comparisons yet to other similar markets within Illinois or neighboring states but that is something I will be working on in the near future.  I would expect residential and commercial agents might have more experience with this type of data but I do think there is a lot of value for investors.  

Example of my Tableau Dashboard for Champaign Urbana:

2004 - 2014 Real Estate Investment in Champaign Urbana

Possible Uses of the Data

1)  Identifying the Path of Progress

2)  New Build vs. Rehab/Additions over the past 10 years

3)  Cost Info for projects to be used in  marketing and offers to motivated sellers

4)  List of Contractors who work in your area

Scott Dixon

Hey @Harnit Koch 

You might want to look at some of the other alternatives such as trenchless repair methods which may or may not be cheaper depending on your specific situation.  Angie's list has a couple of good articles on this issue like the one listed below.  If there is any way to make a temporary repair to get you through the winter your labor charges for traditional trenching might be considerably lower.

Angie's List on Sewer Line Replacement Alternatives

Best of Luck,

Scott Dixon