RESIDENTIAL MOBILITY: THE IMPACTS OF WEB-BASED INFORMATION ON THE SEARCH PROCESS AND SPATIAL HOUSING CHOICE PATTERNS

In the past few years, a vastly enriched information source on housing vacancies has become available through real estate industry-sponsored sites on the Internet. This rich information source has the potential to influence spatial patterns and processes in the search for housing by eliminating information barriers in the search process. Thirty years ago, geographers documented the constraints to the search process caused by limited or biased information fields. The question addressed by this research was whether this new information availability would change the search patterns documented in the 1970s. In order to investigate this question recent movers in Wake County, North Carolina, were surveyed in early 2000, and the characteristics of Web users were compared with nonusers. The major finding of this research is that to date, the Internet has had little impact on search patterns, except that those using the Internet tend to visit a larger number of houses personally than those who do not use the World Wide Web as an information source. [Key words: residential mobility, housing search, Internet.]