Analysis of New York City Real Estate Listings

Objective and Methodology

We examined 1,604 records of properties for sale from New York City, retrieved on September 6 of 2025 from a real estate website. The tools utilized for the analysis were tidyverse, tidycoder, zipcodeR, ggmap and online mapping services from Google Maps.

The legend of the price map was broken down according to the 5th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 95th quantiles. Properties in the 5th quantile or below are in the bottom 5% pricewise, whereas those in the 95th quantile and above are at least more expensive than 95% of the examined properties.

Analysis

Unsurprisingly, Manhattan had the highest concentration of properties that cost at least $1,695,000. Conversely, the cheapest properties were located in the Bronx. This trend was also reflected in the median property price by borough. Not only Manhattan had the highest median out of all five boroughs, but its median was 1.8 the median of Brooklyn, the borough with the second highest median price in NYC. Furthermore, Manhattan’s median price was 4.16 the median of the cheapest borough.

After excluding properties of unknown type, I found that townhouses were by far the most expensive type of property. Townhouses were 7.8 times more expensive than co-ops, the cheapest property type, and 3.3 times more expensive than condos, the second most expensive type of property.

The finding above was counterintuitive as houses are generally more expensive than condos and townhouses, so we decided to look into the size and location of this type of property.

Among the 1,092 listings with known size and type of property, townhouses were found to be the largest, around twice as large as houses, the second largest type of property. Co-ops were found to be the smallest. Furthermore, the relationship between the size and price was found to be positive and significant for all boroughs. A 1% increase in size led to an average increase in price equal to 1.13% The logarithm of the square footage of a property explains 52% of its price logarithm.

Two Chi-square tests, one on the relationship between borough and property type being a townhouse, and another one on the relationship between borough and property type being a house, confirmed these relationships to be significant. While 43% of the listings with known property type were in Manhattan, 56% of the townhomes and only 5% of the houses were located in this borough. These numbers might partially explain why townhouses tend to be more expensive than houses.

Conclusion

The real estate market in New York City shows very interesting trends such as a massive price gap between the listings of Manhattan and those of other boroughs, as well as townhouses being the largest property type. An analysis of other cities of similar size should be conducted to confirm if these cities also show similar tendencies.