Current Real Estate Market Trends During COVID-19 (Coronavirus)

The situation is not so bright for businesses of different sizes around the world and the real estate market is not an exception.

After the COVID-19 outbreak, most of the businesses closed their doors, laid off personnel and clients are only worried about essential products and concerned about how to make ends meet.

How it will affect the real estate market and businesses in the nearest future? What are the current trends in the market? Are buyers and sellers still looking for their dream home during the self-isolation times?

DESA Team has conducted research and came up with high-level analysis for both real estate agents and buyers/sellers on what are the current R/E trends and what we might expect in two/three months.

Methodology

We used Google Trends to analyze the current situation. 

This tool shows us relative interest for specific search terms on Google. How frequently people search for one thing or another.

The tricky part here is to identify how would people search for Real Estate services online so you can see the accurate trends. 

Note: Online demand doesn’t necessarily indicate an intent to sign a contract with a Realtor. People spend a lot of time researching and following before they make a decision. Given the current circumstances, people might hold on making a transaction and/or sign with realtors.  

Analysis

At DESA NINJA, we decided to look at two search queries as identifiers of the online demand for Real Estate. 

Search query – the words and phrases that people type into a search box to pull up a list of results

In our experience working with Google data these two search queries have a high volume of searches and would serve as a good demand indicator:

• “Home for Sale”
• “Zillow”

The tool creates an interest index ranging from 1 to 100 so we can see how people’s interest changes over time.

We can see from the chart that the demand for Real State is still high and people are researching online. March 12th was the turning point when the interest is started declining.

Despite the 20-25% drop in online interest for real estate, a lot of people seem to think of a future and do their research.

Considering the amount of time people have in self-isolation this trend makes sense.

Let’s take a look at the annual trend. How does this look like on 12 months chart?

As we can see from the chart below the demand in March is equal to September.

Conclusion:

• People still planning buying/selling Real Estate
• People still searching online
• There’s a demand for Real Estate knowledge not for immediate real estate services
• The marketing funnel will be longer than last year

Recommendations:

• Pull money back from acquisition campaigns on Google/Facebook
• Allocate majority of your budget to brand campaigns
• Keep posting on social media – provide value
• Create educational content, it’s a great time to start
• Create email sequences for later
• Focus on long term results for now