News media coverage and the predictability of house prices

Oguzhan Cepni

Real Estate Economics, 2026, vol. 54, issue 1, 6-68

Abstract: This article introduces new housing‐media‐attention indices for the 50 U.S. states based on the Bloomberg Terminal News Trends (NT) function, which collects articles from various news and social media sources and identifies their content using artificial intelligence tools. The results indicate that the state‐level housing‐media‐attention index explains a significant portion of the total variation in future house prices, even when economic fundamentals are considered. Additionally, I find that the impact of housing media attention on future house prices is stronger in states with non‐recourse mortgage laws, greater land‐use regulations, and higher social connectedness among individuals of both low and high socioeconomic status. Out‐of‐sample forecasting results further suggest that housing media attention has the potential to act as an early indicator of the direction of the housing market.

Date: 2026
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/1540-6229.70008

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:reesec:v:54:y:2026:i:1:p:6-68

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=1080-8620

Access Statistics for this article

Real Estate Economics is currently edited by Crocker Liu, N. Edward Coulson and Walter Torous

More articles in Real Estate Economics from American Real Estate and Urban Economics Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().