This website was mentioned by the Inman real estate blog today. Bill Tancer tracks web searches, and tracks the results compared to leading indexes. He thinks he has discovered a correlation between searches for “homes for sale” and the NAR index of existing home sales.
One commenter asked why the searches, and indexes were only showing a thirty day lag time. My experience has been that a typical transaction closes in less than thirty days. I attribute that to the fact that Americans are into immediate gratification.
What will be interesting to watch, and I will let this guy track it, and read his posts, is we in the real estate industry are taught that a buyer will begin an online home search six months before they actually contact an agent to view a home. I have tracked home searches on our website, and see six to eight months. So, as Bill Tancer continues to track these searches it will be interesting to see how the search volume compares to sales volume six months later.