Understanding Housing Market Behaviour from a Microscopic Perspective

This paper discusses the usage of micro-level be- havioural data for understanding macro-level housing market behavior. We use sentiment analysis to examine local newspaper articles discussing real estate at a suburb level in inner-west Sydney, Australia. We calculate the media sentiment index by using two different methods, and compare them with each other and the housing price index. The use of media sentiment index can serve as a finer-grained guiding tool to facilitate decision making for home buyers, investors, researchers and policy makers.