This paper presents and assesses a framework for monitoring vulnerabilities related to the residential real estate sector, which can be easily employed for policy purposes. The framework provides intuitive and transparent early warning signals through a composite vulnerability measure, which aggregates indicators in a model-free way across three dimensions of real estate sector vulnerabilities (i.e. valuation, household indebtedness and the bank credit cycle). Our vulnerability measure proves to be a significant predictor of historical real estate crises, with a better forecasting performance than the majority of advantageously in-sample calibrated model-based measures. © 2018 Elsevier B.V.