Google Search Interest in Mobile Homes for Sale
Texans search interest in “mobile homes for sale” moved up a seasonally-adjusted +4.9% in September from last month’s bottoming. The increase was the first positive move in seasonal search traffic since November of 2023.
There’s been a steady decline in search volume from the March 2021 peak through last month, but this same decline is occurring with the broader “homes for sale” search query and doesn’t appear to be singularly occurring to manufactured housing interest. It appears that Texans are searching for homes in general less than they were in the lower interest rate environment but given that manufactured housing can save purchasers more than half on pricing per square foot, perhaps they should add “manufactured” to the front of that query.
Google searches for “mobile homes for sale” in the state of Texas tend to peak in January, slow down through the spring, and then hit a second peak in July before declining through the end of the year.
This interactive chart is built from Google Trends data for the search term “mobile homes for sale”
Mobile Homes For Sale Search Term Selection
The google trends data is pulled for the search term “mobile homes for sale” because the volume of search data for that term is 10 times higher than the volume of searches for “manufactured homes for sale.” In Texas any home with a HUD-Code label on it is legally a manufactured home, and any home built in a factory prior to the introduction of the HUD-Code in 1976 is a mobile home. Despite the legal definition google search data suggests that consumers tend to characterize modern manufactured homes as mobile homes.
Google Trends Data
Google Trends data can give valuable insight into the search patterns of internet users. Because of the enormous volume of searches, Google Trends data is pulled from a random sample of overall searches for a given time period, and that sample changes overtime so the historical data differs upon subsequent views. To get closer to the true amount of search interest for each month, we pull the trend data multiple times and average the results.
The other important thing to note about Google Trends data is that it is normalized over the time span for which the data is pulled. The highest month will have the score of a hundred and then every other month gets a value of what percentage it’s amount of searches represent compared to that highest month’s value. This means that historical percentages will change overtime as new peaks are introduced over time.