IRVINE , CA—Auction.com (link) the nation's leading online real estate marketplace, has revised its March Auction.com Real Estate Nowcast and now projects that existing home sales for the month will fall between seasonally adjusted annual rates (SAAR) of 4.9 and 5.22 million, with a targeted number of 5.06 million.

“We've seen two consecutive months of strong Pending Home Sales reports from the National Association of Realtors, and what we're seeing in both Google Trends data and our own online transactional data indicates that we can expect a stronger March than originally projected,” explained Auction.com EVP Rick Sharga. “Existing home sales have been improving, but at a fairly tepid rate. After starting 2015 with two awfully lackluster months, March may usher in a more exciting spring selling season for the housing market.”

Based on the latest Google Trends data and updated housing market data tracked by Auction.com – which together indicate a shift in March home sales—the adjusted Auction.com Nowcast projections are slightly higher than those released on March 24. The original report called for a range between 4.83 and 5.12 million, with a targeted number of 4.97 million.
The Auction.com Real Estate Nowcast combines industry data, proprietary company transactional data and Google search activity to predict market trends as they are occurring – weeks before the findings of other benchmark studies are released. Building upon the groundbreaking work by Google chief economist Hal Varian, the nowcast model extends a traditional autoregressive-forecasting model to incorporate contemporaneous information that provides significantly enhanced accuracy.