What do people search for?
It’s Friday afternoon and I am getting ready to go out and start celebrating my birthday which this year conveniently falls on Saturday. People around the office have been making fun of my metrosexual party shirt so I had to put a sports jacket back on. Now I feel the need to express myself in a different way, so I am writing this blog post. I’ve been playing around with the overture inventory tool for a while and noticed some interesting things pertaining to real estate market search patterns across the Web. So, what do people search for?
Around 3 million people searched for the term “real estate” in October. But which cities are most popular? The table below gives the most popular geographic searches for “real estate” compared to the city population. The higher the ratio, the more popular the city is.
|
keyword
|
# monthly searches
|
population |
monthly searches/ population
|
| charlotte north carolina real estate | 330,963 | 594,359 | 3.21 |
| bronx ny real estate | 247,402 | 1,332,650 | 1.07 |
| lahaina hi real estate | 216,580 | 9,118 | 136.93 |
| raleigh north carolina real estate | 195,967 | 326,653 | 3.46 |
| knoxville tennessee real estate | 148,080 | 178,118 | 4.79 |
| jacksonville florida real estate | 140,304 | 777,704 | 1.04 |
| las vegas nevada real estate | 136,132 | 534,847 | 1.47 |
| san francisco ca real estate | 132,339 | 744,230 | 1.03 |
| san antonio texas real estate | 113,102 | 1,236,249 | 0.53 |
| durham nc real estate | 111,340 | 201,726 | 3.18 |
| phoenix az real estate | 104,504 | 1,418,041 | 0.42 |
| chicago il real estate | 93,640 | 2,862,244 | 0.19 |
| atlanta georgia real estate | 90,533 | 419,122 | 1.25 |
| real estate baton rouge la | 86,201 | 224,097 | 2.22 |
| houston texas real estate | 85,752 | 2,012,626 | 0.25 |
Lahaina, HI data looks very suspicious. Imagine over 200K people all moving into a city with less than 10K population. Hmm….it’s either a developer paradise, favorite web surfing location, or some kind of bug. Nevertheless, for everything else, the numbers are pretty interesting.
Charlotte, Raleigh, Durham are up-and-coming cities with quickly developing technology industries, seen as places for high-tech workers to find refuge from the exuberant housing prices of San Francisco and New York. Prices in Chicago and Phoenix have been growing steadily in the last few years. Could the current lack of interest be explained by the fact that the prices are topping out and it is not feasible to make a quick arbitrage buck? Can you help me explain the rest? As for me, its time to go and celebrate.
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cw said,
November 29, 2006 @ 10:49 am
in regards to the suspicious maui numbers, i’m not surprised. people were saying that about oahu way back when. now it’s a metropolis. they say if you put all the cars that are on the island on the roads at one time, there would be no room to even move an inch.
Jim Lee said,
February 26, 2007 @ 9:40 am
In descending order the following Keyphrases account for over 44% of all searches on my website.
knoxville real estate
knoxville mls
knoxville tn real estate
knoxville tennessee real estate
The greater Knoxville area is in east Tennessee and near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Our area’s low cost of living and easy access makes it a retirement haven and also a great place to live and do business.
Terry McDonald said,
March 19, 2007 @ 6:55 pm
Fascinating about Charlotte. We are growing to the tune of 30,000 people per year with forecasts of that to continue for the next decade, the equivalent of Cincinatti relocating here… still many of our locals can’t appreciate it as Charlotte develops into a modern city in the south, fuelled by the financail sector, rather than remaining a sleepy Southern City.