10
2005
Fun with Charts
A reader commenting on my last blog entry Real Estate and Hurricane Katrina, brought up an interesting point… Back in June we issued a press release on a spike in the term “housing bubble.” The question, “what’s happened since, and was there any significant movement in searches on “housing bubble” coincident with the recent drop in visits to the real estate category?”
Below is the requested chart. As you can see, searches on “housing bubble” have dropped recently. I decided to include a line on the search term “interest rates,” which you can see spiked two weeks after Katrina and the drop in visits to the real estate category. What does this all mean? I’d be interested in hearing your input and any suggestions on other terms to chart that might shed light on the Real Estate drop.
Might be behavioural: the result of the public’s saturation with “housing bubble”; and with them now moving along the continuum to “interest rates”, since they were made aware that the housing bubble is assumed to be fueled by the low interest rates.
At the most general level, my guess is that all the investor interest in “real estate”, as well as their concern with “housing bubble”, has now moved on to the more immediate “interest rate”. Might be interesting to see if more specific real estate keywords (such as “miami real estate”) are moving from what were hot investor markets to a somewhat different perpective. I do notice, though, the “mortage interest rate” is moving right up there…