Quantitative Estimation and Spatiotemporal Characteristic Analysis of Price Deviation in China's Housing Market

Differences in housing prices and rental prices across cities or regions and the relationship between prices and socioeconomic fundamentals are frequent research foci in urban and real estate economics, but the existing studies on China's housing market rarely consider both housing price and rent. This study provides a framework for a quantitative analysis of a country's housing market from the perspective of supply and demand, and takes China's housing market as a case study. The current study first explores the key factors that affect housing prices and rental prices using data from 202 cities and collected from 2011 to 2014. Then, theoretical values of housing prices and rental prices in each city are estimated, and the spatiotemporal characteristics of deviation of housing prices and rental prices are analysed. The empirical findings of the current study mainly reveal the following three points. First, the determinants of housing prices and rental prices have similarities. Second, the effect of above factors shows obvious spatial heterogeneity. The coefficients of the variables are different between coastal and inland regions, indicating different demand and supply elasticities across regions. Third, the price deviation presents significant spatial agglomeration. Cities with higher price deviations are clustered in the Yangtze River Delta and Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, while the price deviations are relatively mild in the Pearl River Delta region.