Home-price anxiety rises in top states

Bubble Watch digs into trends that may indicate economic and/or housing market troubles ahead.

Buzz: Google searches for the term “housing bubble” are more commonly done in Western states where home-price appreciation has exploded in the past year.

Source: My trusty spreadsheet analyzed Google Trends data — ranking 39 states for the intensity of “housing bubble” searches in the past 12 months — then compared those results to home-price changes from the Federal Housing Finance Agency — one-year gains through June and the previous four year’s annualized gains. Google did not have trend results for 12 states.

The trend

When the 39 states were ranked by the relative frequency of “housing bubble” searches, the 13 states at the top of this anxiety yardstick — 11 west of the Mississippi — had bigger recent price gains than the 13 states in the bottom ranks.

The most worried states had an average one-year price gain of 21.1% through June, versus 15.6% for the bottom 13. Interestingly, that gap between the gains was nowhere as wide when looking at the previous four years. The 13 most-worried states averaged 6.7% gains, versus 5.8% for the least nervous states.

If searches do equal anxieties, such results suggest house value concerns can be tied to rapid increases in appreciation rates: Gains jumped 14.4 percentage points on average from the past year versus 2016-2020 in the most worried states. Compare that to a 9.9-point jump in the low-worry states.

The dissection

The pandemic era’s homebuying binge ap

Gauging housing bubble fears might be just a click away.