This paper investigates the causal effects of air pollution on housing prices in China using a dataset of 65 cities from 2014 to 2021. We employ the central environmental protection inspection (CEPI) as a quasi-natural experiment for air pollution index to show a negative causal relationship between air pollution and housing prices. We also find that this causal relationship is more pronounced for less-developed, manufacturing-intensive and tourismrelied cities. Our results reveal the response to central environmental protection inspection on improvement in regional air pollution protection but its by-effects on housing markets, as the impact is limited if the inspection is conducted repeatedly, suggesting its unsustainability as a regulatory tool.