Using Search Engine Queries as an Indicator of the Real Estate market

Hitwise shows how the real estate market is reflected in search engine traffic

On Wednesday, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) released their existing homes sales figures for July. Headlines covering the release talked about the surprising drop in this economic indicator. Once again, leveraging the power of our search term data (as we did here in our post about the monthly unemployment number, we weren’t surprised by the news; we actually anticipated this drop over a month ago.

In the chart below, I’ve superimposed the monthly data from the NAR on a Hitwise search term volume chart for the search query "homes for sale."

Click here to see the chart

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