Sentiment-based indicators of real estate market stress and systemic risk: international evidence

Abstract

We propose sentiment-based indicators of real estate market stress for the USA, the UK, Canada, Australia, India, and on the global scale. The global and country-level indicators are based on a novel methodology synthesizing textual analysis of real estate research and Google search data. Using mixed frequency vector autoregressions, we show that in the USA, the UK, Australia and India, the sentiment-based indicators are found to mediate the relationship between real estate prices and systemic financial risk. In particular, for the UK, there is a vicious circle involving the interaction among the three variables: the sentiment-based indicator of real estate market stress unidirectionally leads systemic risk, the latter impacts real estate prices, whereas the prices drive the stress sentiment. Canada appears the only sample country where real estate market stress sentiment is unrelated to real estate prices and systemic risk. On the global scale, there is a bi-directional linkage between the stress sentiment and real estate prices. Overall, our empirical findings suggest that policymakers and real estate market participants should account for sentiment regarding real estate market stress in their decision-making.