Teaching Case: California Dreamin' Housing Market Visualizations in Tableau

This manuscript describes the use of real data applied to a fictional real-estate firm for teaching data visualization to university students. In the case study, students employ data analytic techniques in Tableau to clean, organize, and analyze real estate data. By creating visualizations, students address several questions about how selling prices of homes are affected by various factors such as location, industry trends, and property characteristics. The case has been used in business analytics courses; students reported finding the case study relevant and useful, and they were found to largely meet the learning goals of the case, including proficiency with cleaning and filtering data, and creating clear and useful visualizations to convey meaning in Tableau.