Qualitative analysis of housing demand using Google trends data

Abstract

Big data analytics often refer to the breakdown of huge amounts of data into a more readable and useful format. This study utilises Google Trends big data as a proxy for an analysis of housing demand. We employ a qualitative method (fuzzy set/Qualitative Comparative Analysis, fsQCA), instead of a quantitative method, for our estimate and forecast. The empirical results show that fsQCA successfully forecasts seasonal time series, even though the dataset is small in size. Our findings fill the gap in the qualitative and time series forecasting literature, and the forecasting procedure herein also offers a good standard for industry.