Auction.com Revises Downward for January

 IRVINE CA—Auction.com, LLC has released a revised its January Auction.com Real Estate Nowcast projecting that existing home sales for the month will fall between seasonally adjusted annual rates (SAAR) of 4.83 and 5.19 million, with a targeted number of 5.01 million.
Based on the latest Google Trends data and updated housing market data tracked by Auction.com – which together indicate a shift in January home sales – the adjusted Auction.com Nowcast projections fall slightly below those released on January 26 (between 4.90 and 5.21 million annual sales, with a targeted number of 5.06 million).
“Our January Nowcast, like the recent Pending Home Sales report from the National Association of

Realtors, is pointing towards weaker demand by homebuyers as we enter 2015,” explained Auction.com executive vice president Rick Sharga. “In light of near record-low interest rates and slowing home price appreciation, it's troubling to see demand slow down from an already-lackluster level of activity. Hopefully as more inventory comes online in the spring selling season, buyers will return as well.”
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.
Auction.com will occasionally update its Nowcast as fresh data provides additional signals for current home sales activity. The Auction.com Real Estate Nowcast model has proven highly accurate over the course of 2014.