Homes for Sale Search Data Leads to Accurate Housing Prediction by HitWise's Bill Tancer

Thank you to Rick Klau for writing a follow-up post about Bill Tancer's analyis of "homes for sale" searches and their correlation with actual home sales. A month ago, Tancer publised a post on his Hitwise blog describing a correlation between those two variables. I wrote about it here, calling the conclusion into question (yes, I'm quoting myself):

Do Searches for "Homes for Sale" Correlate with Sold Homes?

"Intuitively, does that make any sense? People can't make a decision about which iPod they want to buy in two weeks to a month, much less a home. And this doesn't account for the time between an accepted offer and the actual closing. While there likely is a correlation between the two sets of data presented above, the time line must be considerably longer than Tancer suggests."

So, a month has passed, a new month's data on home purchases is available, and what does it say? That Tancer's prediction was correct.

This goes to show the power of blogs. Unlike newspaper sites who have a tendency to lock content behind subscription-only logins in less than a month, Tancer's blog brings a level of credibility that is only achieved through free and easy access to his archived content. This has led to at least two bloggers (Klau and now myself) linking to his month-old article, which will eventually lead to higher rankings for his site in search engines, and introduce more people to his blog and business through links and high rankings.

Comments

1. Posted by: Sean Hattaway on October 26, 2006 3:54 PM:

No matter what the prediction, we are still having problems in the housing industry. the growth is slow and there is still that probability that it will go lower than ever.

In sight of Trancer's prediction, does he have any solution to combata sudden downturn in the industry? I would be really interested in that.:)

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