A Study On The Affecting Factors For Residents' Housing Tenure Choice

Renting and owning as two main kinds of housing tenure choices are the basic ways to meet the demand for residence. China is a developing country whose real estate market started later than most developed countries. The imbalance between the housing renting and purchasing markets threatened the healthy of the whole real estate market. The study of residents' housing tenure choice will discover the demanding rule of the housing market. It also plays an important role in improving the problem of imbalance between the two kinds of housing markets.Based on summarizing the latest research results of housing tenure choice theories both at home and abroad and combining China's specific conditions, this study put forward a housing tenure choice model that had 18 indexes including the residential characters, demographic characters, economic characters and psychological characters from the point of views of both the supply-side and demand-side. This paper focused on the residents of Shanghai for empirical analysis. The results shows that most variables in the index system have significant influence on residents' housing tenure choice, and have the same influence directions as expected. At the same time, we also studied the factors affecting the residents' first-time homeownership in Shanghai. Compared with the former empirical results, we find that although the family net assets have significant impact on the whole residents' housing tenure choice, it has no significant influence on the first-time homeownership. On the contrary, marital status and housing price anticipation have no significant influence on the whole residents' housing tenure choice but they influence the first-time home buyers significantly. Besides, those who have financial aid will more likely to buy houses whether he is first-time home buyer or not. The conclusions of this study provide advices for the governments' monitoring the real estate market, enterprises' investments and developing, as well as residents' housing purchasing and renting.