The B&K Real Estate Company presently serves the Southeast area by selling houses. Recently, it has expanded to the Northeast. The B&K real estate agents are delighted to cover the whole East Coast and are preparing their southern agents to increase their presence in the Northeast. B&K has engaged your organization to examine Northeast property listing prices in order to provide its agents with 95% confidence in the mean listing price. Three analysis packages are offered by your organization: one that is based upon 100 listings; one that is based 1000 listings and one that’s based 4,000 listings. Because of the cost of data collection, the company charges more for the package containing 4,000 listings that for the package containing 100 listings.
Requirements
B&K requests that you give a sample size suggestion that will provide sales representatives with the most accurate knowledge of property pricing in the northeast at the lowest expense to B&K.
Calculations
To provide an adequate suggestion, we will calculate the confidence intervals of these packages to help us make an informed decision. You can see the computations in this table.
Bronze Package – 100 listing sample size:
Average of 310,000 samples
The error margin for 95% confidence intervals is $24,500
Cost for service rendered to B&K: $2000
This is the 95% confidence interval: CI=sample median error margin
CI=310,000±24,500 sCI=(285500,334500)
Packaging Silver – One thousand listing sample:
Average of 310,000 samples
The 95% confidence interval error margin of $7,750
$10,000 cost for service rendered to B&K
This is the 95% confidence interval: CI=sample median error margin
CI=310,000±7,750 sCI=(302250,317750)
Four thousand listing sample for the Gold Package
Average of 310,000 samples
3900 $ 95% Confidence interval Margin of Error
$5,000 for service rendered to B&K
This is the 95% confidence interval: CI=sample median error margin
CI=310,000±3,900 sCI=(306100,313900)
It is generally preferred to have confidence intervals that narrower in quantitative research projects. In order to improve precision and accuracy, the purpose of an analysis using confidence intervals is always to reduce them. The most significant variables that influence the determination of the confidence interval size are the degree and size (or sample) of the data. The confidence intervals that are more exact will be larger samples.