Project on Dubai Housing Market

Objective:

• To create an analytics dashboard that can visualize the area-wise average rent of properties offering private rooms for accommodation in Dubai.
• Such a dashboard will help individuals understand the area-wise rents and the number of properties.
• The dashboard also captures the location-based trend in the rent.

Data Source

• The data source for this dashboard is Dubbizle, which is a popular online property site that lists rental properties primarily in UAE.
• For this project we are listing only “Rental Properties” with “Private Rooms” based in Dubai.
• Link: https://dubai.dubizzle.com/property-for-rent/rooms-for-rent-flatmates/?room_type=private_room

Web Scrapping Data Using Power Automate

• The data from Dubbizle is extracted via web scrapping using Power Automate Desktop.
• The extracted data is then populated in a Power BI dashboard.

Output Excel Sheet

• The O/P sheet captures the “Monthly Rent”, “Property Type”, “Location”, Link to Image and “Date”.
• In total 2450+ property details is captured during each refresh to sheet 1.
• During each update the old Sheet 1 is deleted and a new sheet 1 with the latest data is created.
• In sheet 2, for each refresh the data from Sheet 1 is copied to sheet 2, thereby creating a historical database to track the rent trend.

Data Cleaning & Transformations

• From the extracted data, the first rent column was in a string format.
  • Hence, first the repeating elements like currency – “AED” and “Monthly” was replaced.
  • The datatype was also changed to numeric data type.
• The “Location” column had to be trimmed to include only the necessary information regarding the location. For this a new conditional column was introduced.
• Based on the monthly rent, a new conditional column was introduced:
  • 0 – 1000 AED
  • 1001 – 3000 AED
  • 3001 – 5000 AED
  • Above 5001 AED
• From the date column, the time components is removed to include only the date.
• In addition a Latitude and Longitude data was also added to provide further enrichment to locating the places in a map.

Data Visualization in Power BI

• Here is the final dashboard based on the data scrapped, cleaned and transformed from dubbizle.

Automating the Dashboard

• The Power Automate data scrapping from Dubbizle is scheduled to run daily which will update the excel sheets.
• The Power BI dashboard is scheduled to refresh the source data daily once to show the updated values.