Earlier today, I stumbled across one of Google’s many data mining gadgets called “Insights for Search” and before I knew it, two hours of my day were gone.

Basically, Insights For Search is just like Google Trends with few more bells and whistles, where it quantifies the number of times various keywords or search phrases are entered into Google’s Search Engine. In theory, you should be able to harness the wisdom of crowds to find the hot items, but as I’m hypothesizing, you may be able to use it as an indicator to find a few investing bargains.

So just for fun, let’s pretend we’re interested in becoming a real estate investor and a foreclosed condo is just what we’re looking for. Insights for Search might be useful in your research if your main goal is:

1. to buy when the news is at it’s worst and no one is wants to buy.
2. to buy because there is no news or the buzz around an asset is at a minimum.
3. to identify sellers because bad news is at all time highs.
4. to identify sellers because everyone is panicking and caving to the fear.

Let’s see what we find after inputting five important keywords and search phrases related to our fictional distressed real estate investment. (Maybe not entirely fictional because I really do want to buy an investment property/condo.)

Real Estate Investment

Way back in the good old days of the real estate bubble, everybody and their mother was looking to buy a party pad in Vegas or a beachfront condo in Miami with a full ocean view.

Doesn’t seem to be the case in today’s market, does it?

Like others, I still think the real estate bubble has some room to fall considering the massive spike in real estate prices in the early 2000s, but still, if the Insights for Search numbers continue to fall and maybe hover around the zero line, could it be just one of many justifications to jump back into real estate investing?

Condo Rental

Whether you want to use “condo rental” to monitor disposable income (e.g. vacationing), or as an indicator related to individuals/families looking for short term housing, it would appear that the “condo rental” keywords correlate well to the real estate bubble popping.

As a former real estate investor, I might use this information to take advantage of the spikes in search rates to places advertisements in the proper locations. Since the major spikes in search occur January and June, I might go heavy on the advertisements near the end of December running through January and at the end of May running through June.

Investment Property

True to form, you wouldn’t expect “investment properties” to be burning up the servers after the real estate bubble pops and experiencing one of the fastest credit freezes in history.

But that’s also one of the greatest characteristics of value and vulture investors:  they usually remain fairly liquid to take advantage of short lived opportunities and like to buy when no one else is buying.

As they always say, sometimes the hardest thing to do, is to do nothing.

Condo Foreclosures

Five years ago, the search phrase “condo foreclosures” wasn’t even on the map. Now it’s skyrocketing. As I said, I still don’t think the real estate market has bottomed as of February 2010, but I do think the vulture real estate investors are picking up a few condos at half price. At the very least, as these results show, an increasing number of people are looking at condo foreclosures as a possible place to put their money to work.

Walking Away From Mortgage

If you’re a banker with a large proportion of loans in an area severely hit by the real estate bubble… look away!

Presently, around 25% of all residential homes are underwater and as much as 50% of commercial real estate loans could be underwater by end of 2010. Not exactly the kind of data you want to hear at the same time you’re talking about economic recovery.

At the beginning of the year, I posted my 4 themes that will influence the financial markets, and as expected, the phrase “walking away from mortgage” has gotten even more popular over the last month. Not to shoot myself in the foot, but let’s hope I was dead wrong and this search phrase will die down as the (jobless?) recovery gets underway.

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