So Just When Do People Search For Their Next Home Online?
Now we know that's it Sunday afternoon and Monday morning according to some revealing data recently posted on the Trulia Insights blog. Hunting for a home appears to go on almost all the time but is lighter in the wee hours of the morning between 3 and 4 am but very heavy around 9 and 10 pm. There's no surprise there since we're likely to be asleep in the early morning and the kids are likely to be a sleep in evening.
The chart (below) is a screen capture showing all states across the 24 hours of a day and for all computer types. It's an interactive chart so you can change your view to include only one state and either computers (meaning desktops) and mobile devices (or exclude one or the other). It is interactive on the Trulia Insights website so you can go an explore where you live and work.
So why is this data important? When it comes to posting an online ad on Craigslist, for example, or writing a blog on a consumer website, that you might want to post the ad and publish the blog post on Monday nights just around 9 pm. That way, your ad or post might be served up first to the most consumers looking for a home. Why else might this be important? When it comes to answering consumer inquiries, real estate agents might want to be available Sundays and Mondays to respond immediately to inbound inquiries.
The data also confirms what I've long thought: That buyers are out looking at homes on Friday, Saturday and Sunday but on Monday they're trying to find the next group of homes they want to look at since they didn't find exactly what they wanted in the homes that they saw over the weekend. The mobile data further confirms that buyers are out in force on Sundays and they're using their smartphones and tablet PCs to look data about homes while their out in the field driving neighborhoods searching for homes for sale.
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