Ziyou Wang

Housing and consumer markets in urban China

In China, the real estate sector has been one of the most powerful driving forces in economic development over the past two decades. The housing sector, particularly, has a strong wealth effect on consumption. This has attracted much attention not only in academia but also in society at large. Yet little is known about the relationship between housing and consumption in urban China. An investigation into the causal relationship between the money flow of the housing market and that of the consumer market for local citizens in urban China applies a recently developed method: renormalized partial directed coherence (renormalized PDC). This is an advanced tool to exclude the indirect relationships between the housing and consumer markets. Since the original renormalized PDC cannot show the result numerically, we quantify the relationships by developing a set of criteria for further discussion within the renormalized PDC framework. The empirical work reveals two major findings: (1) the retail price level is quite useful in predicting the housing turnover-income ratio; (2) the rental price is one of the most important factors affecting the fluctuation of retail prices for the case of urban areas in China. A housing turnover-income ratio (HTIR) is developed to evaluate the money flow into the housing market, which provides a new way to carry out data analysis when the usual indicators might be inappropriate. The research provides a reference point for economic policymaking for the relationship between the money flow into the housing market and the money flow into the consumer market.

Real estate bubbles in China: a tale of two cities

As housing markets have overheated recently in urban China, housing price bears substantial risk. The issue of housing price bubbles in these markets has become a popular and significant topic among consumers, policymakers and academia alike. In particular, Guangzhou and Shenzhen, as the most important markets for revealing the condition of the housing market in the Pearl River Delta, have attracted much attention in the period of prosperity. As such, an investigation into the bubble issue in these two cities is conducted by using an improved model, the time-varying risk model. The empirical work reveals that explosive bubbles did periodically (2003 Q1 to 2006 Q2 and 2009 Q2 to 2010 Q1) have an impact on the two markets. For the rest of the period, housing markets in both Guangzhou and Shenzhen are found to be significantly influenced by macro adjustments and various economic events. The implication of the research provides a reference for policymaking in addressing the issue of softening in China’s real estate market.

The roles of developer’s status and competitive intensity in presale pricing in a residential market: A study of the spatio-temporal model in Hangzhou, China

This study investigates the roles of developer’s status and competitive intensity in presale pricing in residential markets. The study examines various competitive factors in Hangzhou, China, within a spatial-temporal framework. These factors include competitive intensity and developer’s status, plus two independent variable groups: external attributes and project features. To overcome the shortcomings of traditional valuation methods, the estimation makes use of spatial and temporal data via three different approaches. They are the Geographically and Temporally Weighted Regressions (GTWR), Spatial Temporal Hedonic Model (STHM) and Spatial Temporal Autoregressive Model (STAR). The analysis reveals that there exists spatial and temporal dependence in the Hangzhou real estate market. Not only does this study provide new findings and a better understanding of the factors affecting presale pricing, but it also offers valuable implications about competitive intensity for policymakers and urban planners in the spatio-temporal context.

Fundamentals and market sentiment in housing market

Abstract The primary purpose of this study was to explore the predictive power of sentiment on three market indicators (price, rent and transaction volume) in the housing market. Using an advanced causality analysis called Integrated Renormalized Partial Directed Coherence, the study focuses on the private housing market in Hong Kong during 1993–2012. The findings suggest that sentiment not only is a prominent indicator of price and liquidity (volume), but also provides an indirect linkage between rent and house prices in the short run. Armed with causality results, this paper further examines the effect of sentiment on the long run trend of housing market. The results explore different roles of sentiment in rent and transaction markets: sentiment affects housing price and its lagged term has an important bearing on rent.