| China has been experiencing comprehensive reform programs across all industrial sectors including real estate. The implementation of this reform process has brought the growth of various industries such as real estate industry and the huge development of the national economy as a whole. The aim of the study is to understand the enterprises' competitiveness and investigate strategy for competitiveness improvement in the context of the Chinese real estate industry. The characteristics of the Chinese real estate business at both industrial and business level are identified. A comprehensive set of competitiveness indicators is developed for helping assess real estate enterprises' competitiveness, and core competitiveness indicators are identified for business start-up and growth stages. In order to identify the Core competitiveness indicators (CCIs), this study extends the traditional questionnaire survey data analysis approach to using Monte Carlo Simulation technique and Fuzzy Set theory to establish CCIs. This mitigates the weakness of the traditional methods for identifying CCIs from questionnaire information. The identification of the CCIs indicates that developers at start-up stage are indifferent to what are the key competitiveness areas thus they consider almost all areas important. However, developers start to realize the importance of focusing on few areas after they consolidate their business start-up stage, thus they select less core indicators as core competitiveness areas, much less than that selected when they just enter into the market. The 6 CCIs are considered essential to present a developer's competitiveness in the Chinese real estate market, including annual land reserves, corporate brand reputation, access to a diverse range of capital, entrepreneurship opportunity, superior strategic management capacity, risk management capability (response to policy and system changes), and green development strategy to gain the reputation of social responsibility. Core competitiveness indicators (CCIs) are identified for helping the enterprises to focus their resources and strategies on the key areas for enhancing their competitiveness. The analysis on the core competitiveness indicators leads to the formulation of two major strategies for competitiveness improvement, namely, risk management and green development.;The study shows that risk management and green development strategies are proven effective to enhance developers' competitiveness. The results also show that different types of enterprises will obtain competitiveness in different aspects by utilizing their own organizational resources and strengths. This implies that individual real estate developers should formulate competition strategies through analyzing their own competitiveness, considering the external environment, utilizing internal resources properly, and therefore assessing all feasible strategies for management decision. This study contributes to the development of knowledge of competitiveness theory in the discipline of real estate industry. The limitations of the study are appreciated, including the limited sources of the data collected only from China's real estate market. |
