I wanted to elaborate on a point raised in my blog post last week about Shopping and Classifieds trends in Canada. I mentioned in the post that House and Garden websites enjoyed 26% growth in share of Canadian internet visits year over year to April 2010 to become the fifth largest retail industry in Canada (up from 7th in April 2009). We explored this growth in our recent Canadian Retail Online Trends and Opportunities report.
In putting together that report we created a Search Term Portfolio with the top home improvement related search terms. As you can see from the following chart, Spring saw a nice boost for home improvement searches.

The Portfolio is made up of non-navigational home improvement search terms. Among the top Home Improvement search terms were “kitchen cabinets”, “wallpaper”, “solar panels”, “furniture stores” and “patio furniture”, indicating that Canadians were investing in their homes this Spring. The share of Home Improvement searches more than doubled (+120%) year over year in the twelve weeks to June 12, 2010. The chart also reveals that we didn’t see a similar lift last Spring.
We recently posted some analysis on searches for homes for sale and homes for rent and found that growth in searches relating to homes for rent have seen much stronger gains than those for homes for sale. It appears that Canadian home-owners are more interested in investing in existing homes as economic uncertainty continues.
Click here to request a full report of the recent Canadain reatil report: Canadian Retail Online Trends and Opportunities.