Google partners with Auction.com on Nowcast to deliver real-time housing market trends
Google will partner with Auction.com to unveil a new real-time US housing market report.
Entitled Nowcast, the report will apparently predict home sales almost a month faster than the National Association of Realtors.
Auction.com said: "Since real estate trends play such a vital role in our overall economy, there’s a compelling need for accurate, more timely housing market forecasts, rather than data that comes out two to four weeks later.”
Google Capital, a search-engine backed equity fund, announced earlier in the year that it would invest $50m into Auction.com to make this report happen.
Chief executive and co-founder of Auction.com, Jeff Frieden said: "We’re thrilled to be able to launch the Auction.com Real Estate Nowcast – a very tangible result of our strategic relationship with Google Capital."
Essentially the project combines industry data, Google Trends data and proprietary company transactional data to follow and predict market trends in real time rather than analysing them after the fact when they are of less value.
Nowcast will be based on processes developed by chief economost at Google Hal Varian. He said: "Google Trends data – which is anonymized, publicly available search information – offers valuable insights into current economic and consumer trends.
"By layering industry-specific transactional data and subject matter expertise over that search data, organizations such as Auction.com are able to create powerful predictive models for accurately forecasting buying behavior in the present and for the coming months.”
The first Nowcast report was released on Thursday an predicted an October fall in home sales between adjusted averages of 4.967m and 5.380m with a targeted prediction of 5.178m annual sales.