Bernardis_ MAT 240 Project Two.docx - Regional vs. National...

Regional vs. National Housing Price Comparison Report 1
Report: Regional vs. National Housing Price Comparison
Bernardis Carmen
Southern New Hampshire University

Regional vs. National Housing Price Comparison Report 2
Introduction
My job is to complete a report for the regional sales director of a real estate company to
determine if housing prices and housing square footage in the South Atlantic region are different
from the national market. Moreover, since analyzing all the data for the listing price, and square
footage of the South Atlantic region would require too much time, to complete our data analysis
we selected a sample. Samples are a smaller set of data selected from a larger population
throughout a pre-defined selection method, which, in this case, is random. Samples help
researchers study the population. Furthermore, our analysis considers the mean listing price of
the South Atlantic region, and the mean housing square footage, in the end, we want to compare
these two means to the corresponding means of the national market to understand their
correlation.
To create my sample from the Data Set: House Listing Price by Region , I first selected the
sheet containing the data for the South Atlantic region. Thereafter, to create a random sample of
500 observations for the region I created a random column in my excel sheet and used the
random function of excel to give a random number to each datum. Afterwards, I selected the
entire data set and sorted it by the random column. Finally, I copied the first 500 data into a new
sheet. Here is the Excel sheet with a random Sample of 500 houses. The data set highlights for
every datum the state, country and region of each house, its listing price, its cost per square foot
and the square footage.
We used the data from our sample to answer two hypothesis tests. Hypothesis testing
involving a one-sample test determines whether an observed value differs statistically from a
hypothesized population value (Zy Books). First, we want to understand if the mean listing price
of the South Atlantic region is lower - Left-Tail Hypotheses Test -than the mean listing price for

Regional vs. National Housing Price Comparison Report 3
the national market. In this case, the population parameter is the mean listing price for houses in
the national market, we are going to compare this datum with the mean for the south Atlantic
region listing price. Second, we want to understand if the mean square footage for houses in the
South Atlantic is different - 2-Tail Hypotheses - from the national market average. In this case,
the population parameter is the mean house square footage in the national market. We will
compare this datum with the mean for the south Atlantic region square footage.
In both cases, we are going to determine the test statistic, which is a value calculated from
sample data that measures the degree of agreement between the sample statistic and the
parameter asserted in the null hypothesis (Zy books). Afterwards, we are going to use the test
statistic to determine the p-values, which will allow us to reject or fail to reject the null
hypothesis. Finally, we need to look at the confidence level to determine the probability with
which the estimate of the location of the sample means is also valid for the population.