Practice Task: Mt Eden Rentals

Take care to link your discussion to the context and to support your statements by
referring to statistical evidence.
Situation

This is a random sample of weekly rent in dollars for properties

around Mt Eden, taken from Trademe during February of 2010, in the
year of the Rugby World Cup. The suburb of Mt Eden is situated
around the stadium and is considered one of the more upmarket
suburbs in Auckland. Sandringham is a neighbouring suburb with a
large immigrant community.
At the time there was a discussion in the media that some property
owners may take advantage of tourists by renting out their homes for
a high price and that this practice may damage NZs image in the
world as a good tourist destination.
I would expect the upmarket suburb to be less interested in taking
advantage of this opportunity (maybe they dont need the money and
perhaps want to share their home with friends/relations. On the other
hand an immigrant community is more likely to want to exploit the
opportunity.

Problem

Identify the variables you wish to investigate, and establish a related

investigative comparison question. Consider the graphs provided.
What is the difference in the 2010 median weekly housing rental
prices ($/week) between Auckland suburbs of Mt Eden and
Sandringham.
The wealthier suburb of Mt Eden would traditionally command a higher
rent than Sandringham. However, in this situation, the more
entrepreneurial immigrant families of Sandringham are likely to push
the prices up. I am interested to see if there is a difference and
whether the situation has closed the gap

Plan
Data

Analysis

Discuss features of the sample distribution.

Mt Eden median rental is $380 is actually lower than Sandringhams
median weekly rental of $430. This is the reverse of the normal
situation and is more marked than I would have expected.
The Mt Eden distribution of weekly rental prices is skewed to the left
whereas the distribution of weekly rental prices for sandringham is
reasonably symmetrical. Mt Edens rental prices has a significant
outlier at $4500 per week which could be an error or it could be a
sophisticated rental package for a very grand house including
vehicle(s) etc. This could be verified.
The left peak of the Mt Eden data would be worthy of more detailed
analysis. There seems to be quite a cluster around rentals of $200 per
week. This could correspond to a small pocket of state houses or
similar within the overall more affluent Mt Eden.
The IQR for Mt Eden weekly rental prices is $255 where Sandringham
IQR for weekly rental prices is $220. These are quite similar and show
quite tight grouping around their respective medians.
The middle 50% of the weekly rental prices for Mt Eden ranges from
$295 to $550 whereas the middle 50% for Sandringham is from $330
to $550. These are very similar and all of the Sandringham middle
50% is contained in the Mt Eden IQR. This shows that the distributions
are more similar than I would have thought. The Sandringham rental
prices are closer to Mt Eden than I would have thought.
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Conclusion

Make an appropriate formal statistical inference.

Communicate your findings. Include a discussion of sampling
variability, the variability of estimates, and a reflection on the process
that has been used to make the formal inference.
The differnce in the median weekly rents between Mt Eden and
Sandringham is between -$125.00 and $47.50. Because part of this
interval is negtive and part of it is positive (ie the interval contains
zero) there is not enough evidence to say that there is any differnce
between the two suburbs.
If another sample of similar size was taken from these two
populations, I would epect all of the features to be slightly different
which would lead to a slightly different bootstrapping confidence
interval. However, I would expect the same conclusion.
It would apear that the opportunities presented ny the World Cup
have indeed pushed up the prices for Sandringham weekly rents. It
would be interesting to research this further to see if this increase is
maintained into the future. An issue with the data isi that there are 75
Mt Eden values and only 20 for Sandringham. A more balanced set
would likely give a better insight however we can only use the data
that is available at the time.
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