HOW DO ANTI-SPECULATION MEASURES AFFECT HOUSE PRICE DIFFERENTLY BY LOCATION: EVIDENCE FROM THE BEIJING SECONDARY HOUSING MARKET

Abstract

Housing prices in Beijing have been rising continuously since 2010, creating a worrying phenomenon of Chinese citizens. As such, much effort has been devoted to the development of anti-speculation measures by the Chinese government. While plenty of researchers have examined the effectiveness of these measures on the residential market, little has been done to address the impact of such measures across the different submarkets in terms of the houses’ locational attributes. Thus, this study seeks to examine this by uncovering the extent to which commodity housing in urban and sub-urban Beijing were affected by the anti-speculation policies implemented between 2010 to 2015. Specifically, it is sought to investigate the possibility of a correlation between a property’s locational attributes and its resistance to anti-speculation measures. The data sets used for this study was from July 2011 to June 2015. Six rounds of anti-speculation measures were tested, with particular attention paid to policy “Jing No.19”. The findings reveal that anti-speculation measures had minimal impact on the average price per square meter, but exerted a significant impact on housing transaction volume. Moreover, it appears that the anti-speculation measures implemented affected houses with premium location attributes more strongly such that they showed a greater drop in price and less decreases in the transaction volumes as compared to their counterparts with poorer location attributes.