Pittsburgh Homes Daily

I stumbled across an interesting post by Jonathan Miller at Matrix thanks to Homethinking’s list of favorite posts from the week.  He noted an increase in media coverage regarding the housing market in August, confirmed through tracking the use of the term “housing” in a larger percentage of blog posts through a tool at Buzz Pulse, and then argues that media coverage of the weakening housing market has been greater than is deserved by the conditions.

I think I agree with his conclusion about overblown media coverage, but I thought the chart of the term “housing” was too limited.  So I dug a little further and here’s what I found.

It turns out that there has been an increase in the use of the term “housing” in blog posts lately.  Since Jonathan already used BlogPulse, I went to Technorati for comparison.

In the broadest search, it doesn’t appear that there was an increase in posts mentioning housing in August.  Rather, it finds that the coverage has been tailing off since May / June.

However, this, as with any statistics, can be manipulated.  In the next chart, I restricted it to blogs with at least a little authority.

Then in the next chart,  I restricted it to blogs with alot of authority.

The three charts all show a rise in posts about housing over the summer, but disagree as to what date the most posts occured: June, August, or April.  While it would be best to compare summer this year to summer last year, which I couldn’t get, you will notice on the far left hand side of each chart that there was a spike in discussions last year in September as well.

One thing that surprised me about the search was that the term ”housing bubble” was only in about 10% of the stories about “housing.”  I also noted that there was a definite spike in the use of the term housing bubble in August. 

Posts that contain Housing Bubble per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

Posts from blogs with high authority that contain Housing Bubble per day for the last 30 days.

Get your own chart!

For those that look beyond the last 30 days, you’ll find that there was a similar spike in April.

After all of this searching, I was still left with the question of why Buzz Pulse shows what looks to be a dramatic uptick in posts mentioning real estate and housing in August.

Did Technorati show the same uptick in the term real estate?  Let’s take a look (from any authority to highest authority):

Hmmm … So if you search blogs with any authority (or limit your search to only those with the highest authority) then the number of posts appears to be declining from March / April.  But if you exclude blogs with no authority, then it appears the overall trend is increasing.

One flaw in the methodology that Jonathan mentioned was that tracking blog posts might not correlate with media coverage.  I figured I would throw up a chart from Google Trends on that issue.  Google Trends covers both the number of searches for a term and the number of news articles with the term.  Red is real estate, blue is housing, orange is homes for sale.  Here it is:

One flaw in this chart is that it only goes through June 2006.  Yet, it does have the additional benefit of providing a look at the terms in 2005.  I figured that I would also throw up a chart of housing bubble (blue) and housing market (red).

I’ll leave it to you to interpret what these statistics mean.