With all the talk about real estate bubbles, rising interest rates and collapsing home prices some folks are just not listening, they're trying to find out more.

"Internet searches for the terms 'real estate bubble' and 'housing bubble' reached a 12-month high the week ending May 28, 2005," according to Hitwise , an online competitive intelligence service. "The market share of these terms across all major search engines like Google, Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and others, skyrocketed 311 percent and 174 percent respectively versus the prior week."

The market share of total Internet visits for real estate sites is up 19 percent the week ending June 11, 2005 versus year-ago, according to Hitwise.

"Increased traffic on real estate sites is reflective of the sector's growing adoption of Web-based technologies and databases, often used for digital storefronts, marketing, inventory listings and buyer financing," said Bill Tancer, Vice President of Research at Hitwise.

"Still," he continued, "recent Internet search activity suggests that some activity in the category is being driven by curiosity of rising property values and the possibility of a bursting bubble. Should we undergo a market decline, it will be interesting to see how site traffic and search activity correspond."

Hitwise reports that for the four weeks ending June 11th, 25 percent of visits to real-estate sites originate directly from other real-estate sites; 22.1 percent from search engines; 8.1 percent from Web e-mail services; and 6.3 percent from portal home pages.

Once on a real-estate site, says Hitwise, 32.2 percent of visitors will depart directly to another real-estate site; 5.5 percent to a search engine; 4.8 percent to an online bank or financial institution; and 4.9 percent will go to a portal home page.

"Internet users with household income between $60,000 and $149,999 are nine percent more likely to have visited a real estate site in the four weeks ending June 11," says the firm. "Conversely, online users with household income less than $30,000 are 14 percent less likely to visit a real estate site. Users with household income greater that $150,000 are eight percent less likely."

According to Hitwise, online consumers in the "Affluentials" social group are most likely to visit real estate sites. The Affluentials' median income is $60,000, their medium home value is $200,000 and they typically enjoy comfortable suburban lifestyles.

Conversely, says the market intelligence firm, "online users in the 'Micro-City Blues' social group are 12 percent less likely to visit real estate sites. This diverse group is characterized by a predominance of downscale residents living in the affordable housing found throughout the nation's smaller cities. It contains a mix of old and young, singles and widowers, whites, African-Americans and Hispanics. Most of the workers hold blue-collar jobs and their marketplace behaviors reflect varied lifestyles."

The information from Hitwise, which says it monitors 25 million users daily, raises some interesting ideas.

First, it's plain that the Internet is an increasingly-important real estate medium. However, online real estate traffic does not guarantee significant profits, or any profits.

For instance, Homstore.com operates Realtor.com , the biggest real estate site with 12.29 percent of all real estate market share according to Hitwise. Despite such traffic and usage, HomeStore.com reported that in the first quarter of 2005 it had a net loss of $395,000, compared to a loss of $5.1 million a year earlier.

Second, national media trends represent visible and important benchmarks for marketers, economists and policymakers, however sales down the street are more relevant to buyers, sellers, brokers and lenders.

Ask yourself: Do you care that sales in Nome are up, or do you care that a house just like yours on the same block sold for a new neighborhood high? Unless you live in Nome, the betting here is that you really, really don't care about that neighborhood house. Because of the localized nature of real estate, Realty Times carries local market condition reports from thousands of local brokers and salespeople in the U.S. and Canada -- not classifieds, but commentary and analysis drawn from huge numbers of micro markets.

Third, local newspapers and other media remain and will remain enormously important in the real estate marketplace even as Internet usage grows. In the past few days, for example, my local paper ran an article about a nearby community that's expected to grow from 15,000 to 40,000 people in the next 20 years. If you believe that demand impacts real estate prices this story is pure gold -- and one you won't find in any national survey.

In other words, the value of local media is and will be in its editorial product and not the classifieds, a category destined to become too fragmented, too competitive, too common and too much like napkins at a restaurant, a necessary cost rather than a source of revenue.

For more articles by Peter G. Miller, please press here .