It used to be the Rose Parade showed those rubes freezing in the Midwest and back east what a warm-weather paradise we Southern Californians live in.
But now there's research that suggests as the mercury drops in other parts of the country, online searches for homes for sale increase in Orange County.
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San Francisco-based Trulia, which crunches real-estate data, placed the County of Orange as the fourth most searched place in the country for those shivering in the cold across the nation, where in some places January was recorded as the coldest month ever.
Orange County fell between No. 3 Jacksonville, Florida, and No. 5 Richmond, Virginia, on the list, which had Miami, Florida, at No. 1 and Phoenix, Arizona, at No. 2.
Team Trulia analyzed web searches between Dec. 1, 2013, and Jan. 21, 2014, to come up with its Top 10 list.
“It's clear as a bone-chilling winter morning: when the cold wind blows, home searches increase–especially for homes in warmer parts of the country,” Trulia concludes.
Nationally, home searches increased by 2.6 percent overall for every 10 degrees Fahrenheit the temperature dropped, although the site is quick to note that could also be because more people in the those cold places are forced inside to do more indoor activities.
Which reminds me: Anyone checked to see whether we'll get a baby boom out of this polar vortex?
Email: mc****@oc******.com. Twitter: @MatthewTCoker. Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.