Dirty Deep Dive: Google Trends and fun with words
What Google Trends might tell us about Texas land markets
I was scrolling through the Twitter one fine day and was fascinated by the tweet below. We live in the Information Age and the internet is a big part of most of our lives (if you are reading this online blog then surely you agree). Like most of you, I research everything from home inspectors to books to new restaurants before I go anywhere near them. Like most of you, I start on the internet. And, of course, there is that ever-present, faceless oracle, that behemoth of information known as Google where almost all of us start1. And wouldn’t you know it, Google is very nice to share some of their information with us2.
One of the reasons I started this newsletter was the dearth of timely information about Texas land compared to a TON of research available about residential real estate. I started asking questions about what I call ‘acreage properties’ (I define ‘acreage properties’ as any property with greater than 10 acres). I started answering my own questions with a lot of research. So when I see something like the tweet above, I want to see how it translates (or not) and applies (or not) to acreage properties.
In the case of this rabbit hole, I started looking at trends for the phrase ‘Texas Land for Sale’. Here is what I found:
There is a noticeable decline in activity beginning with the peak around January 2022. One should ask the question of whether the decline is a normal seasonal decline or whether it is related more directly to broader economic trends. My initial intuition was that the obvious and sustained downward trend since January 2022 is related to increasing interest rates and a downward trend in the overall economy. But! I found another trend that I was not expecting.
If we are adventurous and take for granted the idea that the phrase ‘Texas Land for Sale’ is indeed correlated to Texas land sales (research that I have not done yet and which I do not offer as fact) then the following chart is very interesting:
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