Initially, I targeted the phrase "<city> homes for sale" as opposed to "<city> real estate" on the believe that the former is only mildly inferior in traffic to the latter keyphrase. Upon achieving first page rankings for "<city homes for sale" did I find out that it is much inferior to "<city> real estate". I then used Aaron Wall's keyword tool which I find much better reflects the traffic. Often times his tool is in sharp contrast to Google's Keyword Tool. Has anyone experienced similar issues?
The Google tool is an adwords tool. It's useful for seo, but you're eavesdropping on another conversation when you use it for that, and you have to remember that.
There's literally billions of keyword tools and only about a handful or so that are actually any good.