Small Size Housing Consumer Segmentation And Their Preferences Study

Recently China’s central authorities have continuously strengthened the macro-control of the real estate market, which leads to increasingly fierce competition in this market. Under such circumstances, it is significant for governments, property developers and consumers to study small size housing consumer segmentation and their preferences. Taking Hangzhou as a case, this paper studied the segmentation of local small size housing consumers based on Value and Lifestyle System (VALS). The characteristics of value and lifestyle can be reflected by seven factors including show-off factor, family factor, personality factor, career factor, stability factor, investment factor and enjoyment factor. Through fuzzy c-means cluster analysis, it can be concluded that four is the optimal numbers of clustering. Based on seven factors and the optimal numbers of clustering, k-means cluster analysis divided local small size housing consumers into four clusters:fortune cluster, leisure cluster, career cluster and family cluster. This paper respectively analysed consumer preferences of four clusters by an evaluation criterion composed of 28 indicators. These indicators can be classified into four categories, including structure factor, neighbourhood factor, location factor and facility factor. The study of consumer preferences is in the framework of Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA). Compared with direct scale and simple linear regression, principal component regression is the optimal method to calculate the data required by IPA. The 28 indicators scattered in four quadrants and there are corresponding measures for every quadrant. This paper also discussed several key indicators specifically and calculated improving priority of indicators in every quadrant respectively.