With the government owning all land in Hong Kong, public land sales have been an important channel for developers to acquire land for property development, apart from private-led urban regeneration. For the colonial time before 1997, land was supplied to the market via a supply-oriented model,...

Shared equity homeownership is a form of subsidised, resale-restricted housing through which lower-income households can sustain their affordability. This paper aims to distinguish two types of affordability within shared equity homeownership: “entry affordability” indicates how affordable...

This study examines the effect of housing wealth on household consumption when there are resale (including refinancing) constraints that prevent housing assets from being cashed out. Based on household-level expenditure data in Hong Kong, two resale constraints are found to have weakened the...

Real estate flippers earn higher returns than average traders in the market. By intensively searching for dumb buyers or sellers, they buy-low and sell-high to earn a monthly return that is 6.0% higher over the market returns. Their excess returns are dictated by the spread of investors'...

Indirect real estate (IRE) returns are often shown to lead direct real estate (DRE) returns. Apart from differences in liquidity, transaction costs, and management skills, the DRE market is also less complete than the IRE market — when negative shocks arrive, one can only short IRE (e.g., real...

Price discovery is an important research topic in real estate due to the heterogeneous nature of housing attributes and relatively thin trading activities compared to other assets. In Commonwealth countries, including New Zealand, governments usually conduct periodic appraisals for the purpose...

The age-period-cohort problem has been studied for decades but without resolution. There have been many suggested solutions to make the three effects estimable, but these solutions mostly exploit non-linear specifications. Yet, these approaches may suffer from misspecification or omitted...

Conventional wisdom suggests that non-local buyers usually pay a premium for home purchases. While the standard contract theory predicts that non-local buyers may pay such a price premium because of the higher cost of gathering information, behavioral economists argue that the premium is due to...

While the outbreak of the COVID-19 disease has caused asset markets to experience an unprecedented spike of risk and uncertainty worldwide, the real estate market in many global cities appears to be immune to the adverse effects. How does COVID-19 affect urban housing markets? This study is a...

New Zealand is a multi-ethnic society that embraces multiculturism. Many studies have examined how the size of the minority population affects residential property values. However, very few studies have recognised that the qualities of neighbourhoods may cause such price differentials. We use...