After a great deal of incredulity at the crazy rent prices I’ve been seeing over the past few months, I decided to go direct to the source of Boston rent data: Craigslist. Craigslist has a lot of problems with it like scams and disinformation from realtors, but it’s still largely the most popular place around Boston to find a new apartment.
With that being the case it seems like the best resource to understand regional rent prices.
So I put together a scraper using scraperapi as my proxy service basically and scrapy to actually scrape the craigslist pages. Currently I’m scraping around 30 cities in addition to Boston since I have the scraping bandwidth.
The data wasn’t as interesting as I’d hoped it be, but over a year or more it likely will be. Still I was able to confirm that most of the unbelievable trends in rent prices around Boston are mostly accurate.
Back when I was looking for places to live last October/November, you could find a two bedroom in Somerville for $2,100-$2,300/mo. It wasn’t easy but it was possible. Now that seems like a dream, when the average price for a one bedroom in Somerville is $2,300 and a two bedroom is $2,800.
So it was at least nice to know that I’m not crazy and it’s way more expensive this year than last year to find a place. I didn’t do a super in depth analysis, but I did put together an infographic which I slapped on Reddit because why not?
