Finding an apartment in Montreal is harder than ever, and the current crisis certainly has not helped.
In January 2020, the Montreal Gazette estimated that the vacancy rate was at about 1.5% in the city (the lowest in 15 years) and that the price of rent had increased of about 3.6% in a single year.
With July 1st coming fast (official moving day of the city), I decided to take a look at the current rental market to see how bad things really are.
Getting the data
In order to do so, I scraped (using BeautifulSoup) data from Kijiji, the main website to find an apartment in Montreal. More precisely, I scraped about 3,500 apartment rentals listings. For each listing, I extracted the price, the size of the apartment and the distance from downtown. I had to use distance from downtown (maximum of 10km) since the actual adress of the vast majority of apartments was not available. Nevertheless, distance from downtown should be a good indicator of whether the apartment is in a desirable location or not. Here is a map of what the 10km radius looks like, for those familiar with the city:

#python #beautifulsoup #data-cleaning #web-scraping #crisis