Internet News Aided Evaluation of China's Housing Market

Abstract

China's housing (real estate) market is booming fast in the past decade and many researchers try to analyze the housing economy and propose measures to put it under control. In this work, we evaluate China's housing market from a novel view of Internet news of Sina in 2001-2011. We compare our results with the major historical events and economic data, and we also study peoples' opinions based on the news. Our main observations are as follows. First, the market condition evaluated from Sina news is quite correlated to that of historical events and economic data. Second, peoples' expectations are basically in accordance with government attitudes. Third, the expectations of price rising and falling are comparable in amount. It can explain psychologically why China's housing market is booming on the whole although people think the price is high. Our work may suggest that our society should continue to take steps economically and politically to change peoples' mind from buying houses eagerly with the expectation of price rising soon so as to cool the market. Besides, this work shows an example that we can derive faithful market evaluations from the information of trustable websites.