Project Scenario

As a recent graduate, you have been looking for jobs throughout New York State. Last week, you received a job offer from a company that is located in Philadelphia. After careful consideration, you decided to accept this job offer. As a result, you have to sell your current home in Latham to prepare for the move. You contact a real estate agent to begin the process of selling your current home. You provide the following information to the agent: your home is 2235 square feet, has 2.5 baths, and 3 bedrooms. There is a 4th bedroom that you converted to a study but can easily be converted back to a bedroom. In addition, the basement is finished and has a half bath; therefore, it may serve as an additional bedroom. The real estate agent suggests that you list your house for $305,000. You want to make sure that the real estate agent lists your house at a price consistent with the other houses for sale in your town. In order to verify this information, you go to the Times Union classifieds and look at all the homes listed for sale in Latham that have between 3 and 5 bedrooms. You take a simple random sample of 30 of these homes and summarize the data in a table, which is attached to this assignment. You will use this data to perform a number of calculations and make a conclusion about whether or not the real estate agent has the house listed at a fair price based on the data that you collected.

Project Calculations Part 1:Descriptive Statistics - Price

1. Use EXCEL to create a histogram of the price data. Include a title and label for each axis.

2. Describe the shape of the distribution and what the shape tells you about the prices.

3. Use EXCEL to calculate the mean and median price.

4. Based on this distribution, is the mean or median a more appropriate measure of center for price? Explain. [Hint: The shape of the distribution will help you answer this question.]

5. Calculate the 5-number summary by hand.

6. Calculate the IQR by hand.

7. Are there any outliers? Identify them using the 1.5xIQR rule.

8. Draw a box plot for the price data. Remember to scale and label the axis.

Data:

House #Bedrooms #Bathrooms Square Feet Price

1 3 2 1550 $329,744

2 3 2.5 1614 $259,000

3 3 2.5 1715 $295,100

4 3 2 1758 $309,500

5 3 2 1794 $282,900

6 3 2.5 1860 $296,950

7 3 2 1877 $219,000

8 3 2 1900 $349,900

9 3 2.5 1911 $374,900

10 3 2 1921 $314,360

11 3 2 1921 $314,360

12 3 2.5 2015 $369,900

13 3 2 2118 $395,342

14 3 2.5 2351 $321,900

15 4 2.5 1800 $209,900

16 4 2.5 2083 $275,000

17 4 2.5 2100 $309,900

18 4 2.5 2112 $317,750

19 4 2.5 2112 $317,750

20 4 3 2210 $279,699

21 4 2.5 2260 $295,500

22 4 2 2400 $239,900

23 4 2.5 2416 $374,900

24 4 2.5 2444 $331,900

25 4 3.5 2600 $369,900

26 4 3.5 3159 $463,055

27 4 6 3200 $479,000

28 4 3.5 3200 $470,000

29 5 2.5 2580 $389,900

30 5 3 3300 $559,000