Housing Services And Category Choice-based Demand For Housing Research

Housing is one of the most fundamental spaces of human activities, and is important to people's livelihood and nation's economy. It has been many years for the scholars abroad to work on housing demand and plentiful research results have been accumulated. Most existing studies took the western mature housing markets as objects and their conclusions cannot be applied directly to Chinese newborn housing market. Researches on Chinese housing market were shattered and far from conclusive. This dissertation took housing demand as objective area, and conducted systematic investigation on Chinese housing consumption behaviors.This paper tried to make a balance between theoretical and empirical analysis. Reviewed the analysis frameworks of housing demand, and described the history and current situation of research home and abroad. The conclusion was that in theoretical aspect the neoclassic consumer theory still occupied a leading position and the analysis framework was stable. Progressions in research were mainly achieved in empirical aspect. Housing demand research has undergone four stages abroad, but was still a very new area in mainland. The domestic studies were shattered and far from conclusive.Based on the data from Hangzhou, the paper studied the hedonic price model of housing, carried out estimation on sub-area models and chose the best ones, and checked the rationality of market subdivision in a single city. It was found that for owner-occupied houses, the logarithm model (Gong Shu District is a linearity model) had the best fitting effect, with Area, House Age and Distance from West Lake as independent variables. While the linearity model fitted best for rent houses (Shang Cheng Qu is logarithm model), with Area, Structure, Storey and Distance from West Lake as explanation variables. The explanation ability of these models was stronger for price difference, while slightly weak for rent. Hangzhou housing market could be subdivided according to district structure.Then, the paper studied housing demand from the viewpoint of housing service. This part described housing demand quantity as housing service, deduced demand function from the utility theory, chose and specified variables, estimated models and adjusted the possible bias by Heckit procedure. The results showed that, on the owner-occupied market, the quantity was elastic to price, inelastic to income, and indifferent to socio-domestic variables; on the rent market, the quantity was elastic to both price and income, and was sensitive to socio-domestic variables. Housing demand showed some stiffness to income, and price was the most important influencial factor. There were two possible reasons. Firstly, demand for owner-occupied houses was not only consumption demand. Rent houses were consumption goods only, while owner-occupied houses were investment goods also. It was commenly acknowledged that houses were excellent investment goods and could resist devaluation and inflation. So the investment demand for housing was surely considerable in an unstable financial environment as nowadays China. Besides, with the macro-economy increased at a rather high-speed continuously, most family held a rising anticipation for price and this would increase housing demand further.Secondly, the culture affects. Owner-occupied houses would bring about psychological satisfaction, feeling of stability and success for consumers. There was a cultural tradition in China that people had great attachment to native land and unwillingness to leave. So it was Chinese dream to own a house. This dream together with the bequest from parent tradition may induce the stronger income stiffness than west markets.The next part studied housing demand from the viewpoint of type selection. This part described housing demand quantity as housing types, made use of discrete models and micro-level data, and investigated the impact of price, income and socio-domestic characteristics over housing types selection. It had been found that, Age of Household Head, Household Size, Education Level of Household Head and income had impact over types selection. Tenure choice was influenced mostly by Age of Household Head. Area was sensitive to Household Size mostly. And Education Level of Household Head was the most influential factor for structure choice. Income was effective for all three dimensions. The most prominent dimension was tenure, and area the next. When a consumer made a decision, it was the first level factor. When the price of one type changed, the market share of its own would change mostly, with other alternatives belonging to the same tenure the following and then others.Compared with existing achievements in this area, the progression of this thesis might be summarized as follows:(1)Probed approaches to acquire data needed by housing demand research. High quality, large scale and easily-acquied data was one of the key causes to promote research of this area abroad. Domestic scholars were confronted with great difficulties of data acquisiton. This dissertation had tried to trail and collect data from the web and by a questionnaire also. This trial made an attemption of data collection and accumulated some first-hand data.(2)Realized the "universal" process of housing demand research-deduced demand function, estimated the concrete impact of price, income and socio-domestic variables, and adjusted the mighty bias caused by tenure. Attempted to adopt discrete model to analyze housing types choice: discussed the possible ways to category housing types, deduced market share holding and changing of different housing types. Such attemption would do good to the standardization of domestic housing demand study, and made it easy to accumulate and compare research findings.