Way back like 8 or 9 years ago — I analyzed Seattle housing data and got a few job offers along the way from doing it.
What I did was scrape housing data from Craigslist and plotted a regression model to figure out which neighborhoods were most expensive. Then everyone on Hackernew and Reddit used it as way to complain about housing.
But part of the reason why I couldn’t practically use the model to find good deals was because very important features about an apartment were rather difficult to extract.
For example, my goal was to build an apartment alerter that would email / text me whenever a new listing that fulfilled my base criteria was posted on Craigslist* and was “undervalued” by my regression model. But what would happen is that I would only get emails for rather shiity looking old apartments because I couldn’t featurize some of the nuances that make finding a good deal on an apartment, an actual good deal!
So how have things changed now with AI?
Well analyzing images is still hard. I didn’t put any effort into doing so even if it’s doable now in 2023?* But what is completely possible now…
