Covid-19 Updates, Emerging Migration Trends

April 1, 2020 7:02 pm Published by admin

---

New Yorkers continue searching for South Florida getaways while Californians increase searches for New York Real Estate terms.

As we progress through the Covid-19 pandemic, we expect to see migration patterns emerge.  To help identify these patterns, we created a dashboard to measure the change in search volume over time from the states most affected.  Our collection process began by pulling state-level Google Trends index data from categorical and location specific searches for the last week, last month, last 3 months, and last 12 months.  We then transposed the dataset to highlight what has changed in terms of categorial search volume for users searching from the highlighted areas as a share of the search volume.  Below are the findings.

 

New York State

The search share decreased for all out-of-state locations and real estate category searches in the last week compared to the last 12 months. Excluding some minor increases for Miami, Cincinnati, Tampa, and Cleveland, the monthly search share decreased as well. Over the last 3 months, the search share increased slightly for several South East cities, specifically West Palm Beach and Miami, where there is an existing increased demand during Winter.

Top 5 out-of-state locations for the real estate category last month:

1. San Francisco
2. Los Angeles
3. West Palm Beach
4. Miami
5. San Diego

 

Washington State

Last week, searches only saw slight movement with increases of 1 for New York, Greensboro, and Norfolk. Last month, searches saw increases of 2 for Harrisburg, San Diego, and increases of 1 for several others. Over the last 3 months, San Francisco and Los Angeles saw increases of 4 and 2 respectively. There were also shifts in position 4 & 5 compared to the last 12 months.

Top 5 out-of-state locations for the real estate category last month:

1. San Francisco
2. San Diego
3. Portland
4. New York
5. Los Angeles

 

California

There was a large increase in the New York real estate category searches last week compared to the last 12 months. Many other cities saw minor increases in weekly search share as well. Monthly search share increased slightly compared to the last 12 months for several cities with New York seeing an increase of 2. For the last 3 months, search share only saw slight increases overall.

Top 5 out-of-state locations for the real estate category last month:

1. New York
2. Austin
3. Dallas
4. Houston / Miami / San Antonio (equal values for search share)

 

Explanations

• The “Real Estate” category on Google Trends typically includes searches like “Los Angeles Apartments”, “Real Estate Los Angeles”, “Houses in Los Angeles”, and “Zillow Los Angeles”, among others.
• The values represented in the dataset show the percentage of searches relative to the total number of searches at a specific time and location. More can be found on this here: https://support.google.com/trends/answer/4355212.

 

 

Dataset is sortable by clicking the column headers