Want to track house prices? Have a look at online searches
Monday, 28 April 2008
House prices track closely with the level of online searches for homes for sale, according to study by online measurement firm Hitwise.
Hitwise compared online search levels for the term “homes for sale” with median monthly house prices in the US for the past year. The result? A tight (0.92) correlation between the two, with the number of online searches tracking the steady decline in house values in the US closely.
As Hitwise points out, the result illustrates that online information – in this case, internet searches for "homes for sale" – can provide useful information on events in the real world such as house prices.
Of course, the interesting question is whether the search results are in any way predictive of house prices. Hitwise says the search figures for April were flat – let’s see how the house price data turns out.
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