Launching our Summer Data Challenge

If you’re just here to register, here’s the sign-up form.

We’re always trying to get as many people involved as possible with Student House Finder. With our goal to open up and democratise the market, it only makes sense that we share our data to people who want to try new things and explore how housing works in the city.

That’s why we’re launching our first ever Summer Data Challenge. It's a two-month open-ended competition where students themselves can look at our housing data, see what’s going on and get stuck into data science, as we have done ourselves this year in our blog posts and Data Dives.

The Summer Data Challenge has been kindly supported by YuFund at the University of York. To contact us about the challenge, email summer-data-challenge@student-house-finder.co.uk.

Sign-up here

How it works

From 11th July, you can sign up to the challenge. Register in a form, and within a few days you’ll be sent our Data Pack for the challenge. This will include:

1. Data about houses that we’ve collected since we started Student House Finder (e.g. which houses were available and for how much)
2. Links to public data online that will be relevant in providing context (e.g. numbers of houses in York and their types)
3. A small amount of data that we have obtained from public bodies using Freedom of Information Requests (e.g. some HMO data)
4. A glossary of common terms that we think you might need

Your goal is to come up with meaningful insights about one aspect of student housing. There are dozens of paths you could take from this - pricing, planning rules, environmental impacts, transport links and community relations - to name but a few areas with a lot of data available. Ideally you’d be focussing on York, but it might be helpful to compare with other places as well.

When you’ve come to conclusions, with a couple of graphs or maps to show off, you can submit your entry in whatever format you like. It could be an article or poster (we’d suggest 1-2 sheets of A4), or video (about 5 minutes) to demonstrate what you’ve found.

You’ll have until 26th September to prepare your entry. It may sound like a long time, but we’ve found that getting these things right takes much more time than expected. When you sit down and look at the numbers, more and more questions start to materialise and you won’t want to leave any avenues unexplored.

We’ll decide on a winner for the £100 prize and announce them in October, publishing the best entries on our website. All of the things you create will inspire our work and make student housing in York fairer for everyone.

Sign-up here

Rules

To enter, you need to follow our rules!

Eligibility

The challenge is open to students, academics, data scientists and anybody else with an interest in the theme.

For commercial reasons we can only offer a subset of the data available to people currently or formerly working in the property industry. If you supply incorrect information during sign-up for this question, you will be liable to reimburse us for the value of the data.

Data confidentiality

During the challenge, some of the data you'll be given will belong to Student House Finder.

You must not share the data, raw or processed, with anyone outside of the challenge.

After you've submitted your entry, to ensure fairness you must wait until we give approval to share your entry with the general public. We reserve the right to prohibit publication if your work does not sufficiently obscure the original data.

Using your work

When you submit your entry to the challenge, we may use your work on our website, in our communications, and to promote Student House Finder. You will be credited where appropriate, using the name you gave at the start of this form.

We may take inspiration from your work to develop future housing campaigns, tools and services. However, these will be owned by Student House Finder.

By signing up for the Summer Data Challenge, we will process your personal information including your name and email address, which may be in perpetuity if we publish your entry on our website. This is in addition to our Privacy Policy. To contact us about privacy concerns, email privacy@student-house-finder.co.uk

Prizes

Prizes are awarded at our discretion. You must have a UK bank account and be able to verify your identity over a video call to receive a prize. You are responsible for complying with any tax rules. The winner will forfeit their prize if they can't be contacted within 7 days.