Do We Really Care?
The Time article, “Will the Housing Bubble Burst in 2007?” puts an interesting spin on the bubble bursting in the housing market. While prices have obviously dropped across much of the U.S., Time doesn’t believe its a true burst in the bubble mainly because of buyer and seller sentiment.
According to their research, we don’t seem to be buying the idea of the bubble bursting. In fact, we do not seem to be paying much attention to the media’s “sky is falling” stories. What do they base their research on? Internet searches performed by consumers. They theorize that as bad news continues to build around the housing market, you would expect that “housing bubble” searches would be nearing a crescendo, but the opposite is true.
For example, they found that as of the week ending February 17th 2007, searches for “housing bubble” have reached a two year low, only 4.4% of the searches on the same subject that occurred during the second week of June 2005. A media push around a pending correction occurred that very same week. As the author points out, this either demonstrates just how suggestible we are or how short are attention spans really are. You decide which.
They do however caution that search terms such as “sell my house fast,” and “how to stop a foreclosure” have been rising in volume. If the volume continues to climb that may signal an urgency to sell, and the housing bubble alarm may begin to sound in earnest.
NOTE: Chart of weekly search term share of traffic to ‘all categories.’ Breaks in graph represent insufficient data. Source: Hitwise
Popularity: 11%