A scientific understanding of the real estate sector’s role in the national economy is essential for facilitating reasonable and effective regulation and promoting economic development. By analyzing panel data from a sample of 67 countries between 2010 and 2018, we examine the role of the real estate sector in different countries and its determinants. This empirical study yields three main findings. Firstly, there is a strong correlation between the real estate sector and the financial services sector, the construction industry, as well as wholesale and retail trade. Notably, China’s real estate sector exhibits relatively high direct consumption of financial service activities compared to other major countries. Secondly, there is a transition trend in both the input and output of the real estate sector from primary and secondary industries towards service-oriented industries. Lastly, key determinants influencing the economic effects of the real estate sector in a country include economic growth, current national income level, expense structure of the economy, aging population, as well as urbanization speed.

This paper empirically investigates the heterogeneous impacts of the media sentiment about policies with different themes on the real estate market in China. Based on the policy texts collected from both official and unofficial sources, we construct sentiment indices to capture the sentiment about policies with different themes, including real estate policies, fiscal policies, monetary policies, land policies, healthcare policies, household registration policies, and education policies, using text mining methods. Mediation models and GARCH models are then established to examine the impact of these sentiment indices on the real estate market. The E-GARCH model is established to examine the asymmetric effect of positive and negative sentiment on real estate market. The results show the following: (1) The real estate market in China is more affected by the policy sentiment on official media compared with the unofficial ones. (2) Policy sentiment affects the real estate price through the mediating variables of interest rate, real estate construction area, and real estate sales. (3) The impacts of sentiment with different themes on the volatility of the real estate market are heterogeneous. (4) The impacts of policy sentiment on official media are more pronounced in a tight government-policy environment than those in a loose one. (5) The effect of negative unofficial media policies sentiment on real estate price is bigger than the positive unofficial media policies sentiment.