News yesterday that housing starts jumped 10.5% to a four month high provided some hope that the National Bureau of Economic Research’s pronouncement that the recession was so 2009, may in fact, have some validity.
We’ve been following the online component to real estate industry activity, our Business – Real Estate category. In the chart below, you can see that as of August 2010, visits to the Real Estate Category are down 20% compared to highs in 2008 and 2009. In fact, reviewing visits to the category over several years we can see that last year’s visit pattern was markedly different that the typical pattern we see in 2008′s data indicating that 2009 was clearly different than previous years. Regardless of visit patterns, the online housing market remains challenged.

One of the big challenges of making the jump from online activity to consumer sentiment and intent to buy or sell real estate is that an online visit to real estate could indicate the beginning of a real estate transaction or just an exercise in window shopping.
Today, we announced the release of our latest demographic tool, credit scores with VantageScore. Now we’re able to view the aggregate credit scores of visitors to websites and industry categories (note that VantageScore scoring differs from FICO scores in that VantageScores range from 501-990 and are grouped by letter grade).
Here’s the distribution of visits to the Real Estate Category over the last four weeks by VantageScore:

The following graph, shows the change in distribution of VantageScores over the last three months.

Looking at credit score data, Mid-June showed a little glimmer of hope, an inflection point for the highest ranked credit bin A(901-990). If we assume that those with higher credit scores are more likely to be purchasers versus window-shoppers, (the opposite of lower scored visitors) the graph above may indicate the return of serious buyers and sellers to online real estate sites. Stay tuned for more analysis.