Does Google Trends Show the Strength of Social Interest as a Predictor of Housing Price Dynamics?

Abstract

A recently emerged sustainable information society has ceased to be only a consumer and has become a web-based information source. Society’s online behaviour is tracked, recorded, processed, aggregated, and monetised. As a society, we are becoming a subject of research, and our web behaviour is a source of information for decision-makers (currently mainly business). The research aims to measure the strength of social interest in the housing market (Google Trends), which will then be correlated with the dynamics of housing prices in Poland in the years 2010–2021. The vector autoregressive model was used to diagnose the interrelationships (including Granger causality) and to forecast housing prices. The research showed that web searching for the keyword “dwelling” causes the dynamics of dwelling prices and is an attractive alternative to the classical variables used in forecasting housing market prices.