Google launches rival to NAR’s home sales forecast: VIDEO

The "Nowcast" uses search data to predict home sales

Google is making an aggressive push into real estate technology, hoping ultimately to predict home sales with extreme speed and accuracy.

Last spring, Google Capital, an equity fund backed by the tech behemoth, announced the $50 million acquisition of Auction.com. What it got out of the deal was data, according to CNBC.

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Now Auction.com is launching a new monthly report called the ‘Nowcast,’ which it claims can predict home sales up to a month faster than the National Association of Realtors.

“This is as close to real-time data as you can get. We’re looking at search traffic that is taking place that month—and really right up to the day of the ‘Nowcast’—to interpret what’s going on in the market,” Rick Sharga, executive vice president of Auction.com, told CNBC. So essentially, Auction.com is layering its data over Google search data to come up with the home sales forecast.

“Then based on the relationship we’ve seen between that search behavior and real estate purchases, we can predict what that month’s activity is going to look like,” Sharga said. [CNBC]Christopher Cameron