Erik worked with Lynn Wu, now a professor at the Wharton School, to develop a simple model that predicted housing sales and prices. They used data from Google Trends, which reports how often words like “real estate agent,” “home loan,” “home prices,” and the like were searched for each month in each of the fifty US states. They used their model to predict future housing sales and compared their forecasts to the published predictions made by experts at the National Association of Realtors. When the results came in, their model beat the experts by a whopping 23.6%, reflecting the power of
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