Mapping Beirut's Rental Market with GIS

In Beirut, Lebanon, rent remains the main form of shelter acquisition, but a civil war and a repeal of rent control have led to high rent prices that are unaligned with renters' incomes or earning abilities. The scare market forced tenants to sign three-year leases and, in many cases, pay a year in advance. With recent stabilization in the region, property management companies and property owners flocked to neighborhoods of Beirut and transformed them to attract people of a higher social class, displacing low-income earners to areas that are further away from their jobs and the city center.

In a period of housing uncertainty, many residents and potential renters need access to rental market information and transparency on trends in neighborhoods. The lack of information about housing quality and pricing has increasingly become a substantial hurdle for those looking to rent. Beirut Urban Lab, an interdisciplinary research lab that analyzes and distributes information about the built environment in Lebanon, sought to provide visibility about the rental housing market.

A lack of transparency further generates severe inequities among city dwellers, disadvantaging particularly the most vulnerable social groups who often pay overpriced rates for substandard units. The Beirut Urban Lab wanted its system to integrate data about rental conditions like rent prices and neighborhood characteristics within a location-based context. The lab leveraged geographic information system (GIS) technology to crowdsource, collect, map, and share information on Beirut's rental market. 
 

Building on the Beirut Urban Lab's Beirut Built Environment database, first the team conceived a web app, created using ArcGIS Experience Builder, containing embedded ArcGIS Dashboards modules. The platform is optimized for Arabic and English, and its functionality extends to desktop and mobile devices. The hub site brings together maps and spatial and environmental characteristics.

City of Tenants is designed to be a user-fed geoportal, whereby tenants and researchers can log rental costs in relation to housing conditions for rented-out units. The platform also allows the sharing of information collected in an accessible and clear form, to improve home seekers' knowledge on existing housing conditions and counter the ongoing reliance on asking prices, which tend to be inflated.

The data for City of Tenants is anonymously collected using a survey from current tenants living in different neighborhoods in Beirut. ArcGIS Survey123 is a smart app that allows the user to quickly answer questions in a form. The collected data is then immediately uploaded on the ArcGIS system. Tenants provide their email addresses to access the survey, and if the developers notice malicious use of the survey, they can eliminate bad data so that the platform stays as clean as possible. The platform invites researchers and other professionals to explore urban trends in Beirut.

City of Tenants incorporates ArcGIS Survey123 and ArcGIS Experience Builder to collect data about the units' occupancy status. ArcGIS Experience Builder allows the data collected to be displayed in a compelling web application on a single screen. In addition to the survey information, the platform uses dashboards as a visualization and analytic tool and Map Viewer, a software as a service technology, to show the city of Beirut with base layers and information about collected data such as average rents by zone and surveyed locations.

"The mapping component is an integral part of the City of Tenants platform. It allows for georeferencing of the data, which in turn provides critical insights about the correlation of rent and neighborhood characteristics," said Mona Fawaz, professor of urban studies and planning for the American University of Beirut and cofounder of Beirut Urban Lab. 
 

By having greater visibility on data about modes of payments, rent prices, apartment size, building conditions, number of occupants, and year of construction, current and future tenants can develop informed expectations, and this market visibility is a necessary first step toward the formulation of responsive public policies that can address the rental sector and ultimately serve the goals of housing justice. With more information, tenants reduce the time lost in searching for adequate housing options and contain negotiations with property owners by providing reliable benchmarks about existing practices.

Policy makers can also rely on the City of Tenants platform to understand gaps in the rental market, price gouging, and other practices to create public policies that better inform potential renters. Indeed, access to publicly available rental market data empowers potential renters' decision-making to create more favorable rental conditions for themselves. Before the solution was created by Beirut Urban Lab, renters did not have access to transparency into what property owners were charging for rent.

To date, the City of Tenants platform has collected 1,800 data points, and the collection is ongoing.

"We are still in the analysis phase of this project, but we are collecting information across 20 variables including cost and type of utilities, currency of rent payment, and formality of agreement, and others," said Fawaz. Of the data collected so far, 70 percent of renters have informal contracts or an oral agreement with the property owner, and households are heavily burdened by rent (with a reported rent burden of 95% of income.

In the future, Beirut Urban Lab hopes to expand the City of Tenants to other cities in Lebanon. The lab further hopes to develop the platform so that data is automatically updated based on Survey123.