Thanks for the response, the added detail and .CA perspective.

I also saw the trend across many markets and industries. If you follow the examples above (hotels, restaurants, lawyers)…at best you will no growth and usually significant declines over that 4 year period tracked by Trends.

The lack of granularity does limit the usefulness of Trends as a testing environment, but seeing the search for Yelp San Francisco (above) does buttress the idea that the larger verticals are taking up some of that traffic.

Another item of note is that Google removed the Local OneBox on the search Real Estate + Locale about a year and half ago and put in a real estate inventory search onebox. That response didn’t seem to slow the decline.

Mike

If you do the same search for major Canadian cities you see the same decline in search volume while real estate markets continued to climb through to this year (Canadian market is peaking now and starting to turn).

So i think the decline is better explained by an increase in sophistication in user behavior. Someone today looking for real estate in Boston may instead do this “uphams corner real estate” or “cambridge 2 bedroom condos for sale”. They get more specific to exact communities within the city as a broad metro real estate search may overwhelm them with too many listings in parts of the city they don’t want. Their tails are getting longer too.

As more and more small businesses come online with their own websites, or through Google Maps and Yahoo Local listings, searchers are noticing that finer scale local searches are now producing decent results.

But Goog Trends data ain’t fine scale enough to test this. But keyword usage in my clients webstats certainly supports it. I see lots and lots of longtail local key phrases.