Dimi Gatsos - Irish Rentals Market

Visualizing Ireland's Rental Market using Tableau

Project Overview

Goals:

Explore rental market in Ireland ahead of moving there
Improve Tableau and dashboarding skills

In this project, I focused on analyzing the current rental market in Ireland by scrapping real-time data from two major property websites, daft.ie and myhome.ie, in late September 2024. Using Tableau, I visualized the data to create an interactive dashboard.

Here are some key insights from my analysis of Ireland's rental market.

96% of total listings fall in the €500 to €4700 range, with 66% of these listings found in and around Dublin.
The rent-to-income ratio in the same areas is 35% for a couple, with a mean income of €6380 and mean rent of €2228.
The counties around the four major cities - Dublin, Cork, Limerick, and Galway - have a mean rent of €2159, which is almost 28% higher than the rest of the counties where the mean rent is €1690.

Scrapping

For this project, I developed two Python-based scrapers using Selenium to extract rental data from daft.ie and myhome.ie. Both scrapers focus on gathering key details such as price, location, and property characteristics, but they differ in how they handle HTML variations between the websites. The daft.ie scraper collects raw data and applies cleaning and formatting functions (e.g., clean_price(), extract_info()) after the extraction.

In contrast, the myhome.ie scraper formats and cleans data during the extraction process, streamlining the data pipeline by integrating these steps directly into the scraping function.

daft scrapper

myhome scrapper

Exploring the dashboard

Only around 100 listings have a price higher than €4700, Including some extreme ones. The rest 96% of total listings cost less than €4700, with 66% of these listings -or 1619 properties- found in and around county Dublin.

The rental landscape in Ireland reveals a significant divide between urban and rural areas, particularly around the major cities of Dublin, Cork, Limerick, and Galway. In these urban regions, the mean rent is €2159, making it nearly 28% higher than in the more rural counties, where the average rent is €1690. This disparity highlights the increased demand for housing in and around these major urban hubs, which drives prices higher.

Only around the major cities:

Excluding major cities:

Among the 2555 properties analyzed, 1992 have a recorded furnished status. Of these, the overwhelming majority —1841 furnished properties— command a mean rent of €2210. In contrast, the 151 unfurnished properties have a significantly lower mean rent, averaging €1355. This data reveals a clear rental premium associated with furnished properties, suggesting that renters are willing to pay more for the convenience of a fully equipped living space:

My analysis covered properties across ten different property types, yet only three of these—House, Apartment, and Flat—dominate the listings. These categories account for a total of 2407 out of 2555 listings, highlighting their prevalence in the rental market. This concentration suggests that these three property types are the primary options available for renters, with other types playing a much smaller role in the overall market.

Lastly, I added some really useful customization features to my Tableau dashboard, making it more interactive and easier to use. Filters for counties and property types were added for exploring rental trends in specific regions or for particular types of properties.

Any adjustments made are immediately reflected across all charts and maps, ensuring a seamless and dynamic exploration experience.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to reach out for any comment.

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