Data Collection

Sorry, I forgot to publish this post, so many of you just saw "I collected data."

Since I was out at LSU last week, I was not able to make any posts. I did collect some data over the weekend, however. I contacted Latter & Blum last Tuesday and asked for any listings that were sold in the past year or so in the New Orleans area. I told them about my project and what I intend to do with the data, and they were happy to give me the data. The hard part is that they gave me over 1,000 listings! I admit, 1,000 survey results would be a lot easier to record than 1,000 values, but alas, this is all for the benefit of my project. This week, I've been putting in the data in Excel, and trust me, it has not been fun. However, since we did record hundreds of values before in my statistics class, I feel that I am able to do so without any major problems or obstacles. As expected, some prices ranged from about $40,000 to $2,000,000, and properties ranged from one-bedroom small houses to even a four (yes, four) story house. It seems that even though we are still "rebounding" from hurricanes and the like, our real estate business is still going strong, and will continue to do so for the next year or so. The New Orleans selling price average (so far) seems to be a little ahead of both the Louisiana and national averages, but only by about ten thousand dollars. I can see if this difference is really a significant difference, or that it is really a small difference since the values are so high. This website: http://www.surveysystem.com/signif.htm gives a good description of "significance" in data, and even shows an example to find significance. I feel that I truly understand significance in stats, which is very beneficial for my project results.

Here's a link to help make graphs in Excel that I think will be very helpful: http://peltiertech.com/Excel/ChartsHowTo/