I had a look at this service and as ever when Google launches something new I check it out as they never launch anything that isn’t deeply valuable and this is. However as a function of NZ scale and out ISP structure I see the regional data being irrelevant due to inaccurate ISP determination – that is my read of the data I saw given our sites visibility to real estate around the country (if you were to believe Google stats then everyone is in Taranaki or wants a house in Taranaki).

As to your second chart – that is very interesting. I think whilst underlying it there is a degree of decline in the search term real estate – this is now being supplanted by far more relevant long tail searches as in property for sale in Bulls or 2 bedroom houses for sale in Hamilton.

Using Nielsen Online data the traffic of UB’s to real estate websites has climbed unchecked in each of the past 3 years to now over 100,000 per day driven largely by Trade Me. I track the market and share information on 2 blogs Unconditional and On Target, the latter is a conversation with the real estate industry. A recent
post I wrote shows a graph tracking the UB’s of domestic traffic for a basket of real estate websites over the past 3 years and shows the slow down in interest this year from the trajectory of growth over the past years, although the past month has seen a recovery.
The basket of website excludes Trade Me – merely because their traffic is very dependent upon the overall performance of the total trade me site as opposed to the sentiment in the market.