About this Newsletter: Get a quick but finer view of (still) one of the most important sectors in China, with the weekly chart and commentary from Real Estate Foresight (REF) - drawing on 13+ years of REF's research on China housing markets.

The changes in how the local Chinese media cover certain topics at the headline level can be quantitatively illuminating, reflect the current sentiment, or even be predictive.

For example, if the frequency of mentions of a policy theme spikes, it could reflect the latest policy moves or expectations of the next policy move.

Technically, we calculate the relative word frequency indices for the predefined groups of keywords (in Chinese, although we present the results in English) to capture headline-level coverage by major publicly available Chinese media sources online.

The indices are set to Max = 100 per data series, which is important to 'remember' where the equivalent really was, say, a year ago.

We have been using this method since 2017, developed at the sister venture Robotic Online Intelligence (ROI) and the Kubro(TM) platform - where we apply it to different sectors and use cases.

The chart above covers the theme "stabilize the real estate market", with a new spike in December, which should reflect the commentaries on the weak official data for the new home sales sector that came out in recent months.

It can also indicate the expectations of new policy measures to address the housing market struggles.

Still, in relative terms, this is much lower than the peak (100) at the end of 2024 / early 2025. That, in turn, likely illustrates the policymakers' restraint in how far they might go in support of the sector.