Modeling urban housing price: The perspective of household activity demand

Abstract

Existing studies about the modeling of urban housing price have figured out sets of factors and the main focus is on the relative spatial location. Generally, this line of research is descriptive rather than modeling in nature. The underlying reasons for the distribution of housing price are largely unexplored and more research is needed. The paper therefore attempted to systematically explore the spatial heterogeneities of urban housing price based on the urban activity interaction rule. Using Beijing as a case study, this study first developed a new measurement of accessibility which directly depicts the cost and possibilities to access opportunities of different activities such as employments, educational, shopping and medical services. From the perspective of demands of different households, the paper then modelled the relationships between urban housing price and these accessibilities and found that the distribution pattern of housing price can be relatively well represented by this model that the R2 could achieve 0.7. We investigated the relationship between housing price and the demands of different kinds of households categorized by households of one-generation, two-generation, three-generation and four-and-plus-generation and found that the demands of household of four-and-plus-generations is the most highly correlated with housing prices. The reason might be that this kind of household has more household members and the demands are more diverse and complex, which is more similar to the distributions of all kinds of activity opportunities in the real world. In the end of the paper, some implications for policy-making are proposed based on the results of the analyses.