The Role of Twitter Sentiment in the Analysis of Housing Prices in Turkey

The housing market is an important reflection of economic stability and the financial situation of individuals. Therefore, understanding the factors associated with house prices is very important for individuals and policymakers. While traditional economic indicators and data sources are widely used in analyzing the housing market, new data sources such as social media platforms have increasing potential. This study aims to analyze whether there is a relationship between data shared on X (Twitter), one of the social media platforms, and house prices. As a platform where users express their thoughts and feelings, X can reflect perceptions and trends about the housing market. Within the scope of the study, sentiment analysis was conducted on a total of 57,646 tweets in Turkish, and the results of the analysis were associated with house prices. The findings show that 65.21% of the tweets contain neutral, 27.07% negative, and 7.72% positive sentiment. This suggests that social media users have a largely neutral attitude towards the housing market. While neutral sentiments are usually excluded from the literature, this study offers an important innovation to the literature by addressing neutral sentiments comprehensively. The results show that sentiment analyses derived from social media data provide a valuable contribution to understanding housing market dynamics and can offer an alternative perspective to traditional economic methods. In this respect, the study aims to shed light on the understanding of housing market dynamics through a new approach using social media data in addition to traditional economic analysis.