China's National Bureau of Statistics said that the annual growth of housing price reached 24% in 2009 after the financial tsunami. Is it a recovery or a bubble? What makes the housing price increasing so quickly? Price-to-Income Ratio is by far the commonest measurement method to housing...

Income segregation is found to be a common phenomenon, which imposes far-reaching implications on housing and social policies. However, the focus has long been on its extent rather than on its distribution. This study investigates the asymmetry of income segregation and the relationship between...

"By reviewing the previous three asset bubble implosions, viz. (1) the íLost Decadeî of Japan in the 1980s; (2) the Asian Financial Crisis in Hong Kong in 1997; and (3) the Financial Tsunami in the USA in 2008, a common symptom of negative real interest rate is very clearly revealed before the...

Purpose: This paper aims to examine the effect of housing wealth on household consumption when there are resale and refinancing constraints that prevent housing assets from being cashed out. Design/methodology/approach: Based on Household Expenditure Survey data in Hong Kong from 1999 to 2010,...

Purpose: 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...

Purpose: The repeat sales house price index (HPI) has been widely used to measure house price movements on the assumption that the quality of properties does not change over time. This study aims to develop a novel improvement-value adjusted repeat sales (IVARS) HPI to remedy the bias owing to...

Purpose: Real estate is an asset that is traded in highly segmented, illiquid and informationally inefficient local markets. A short sale in real estate is almost infeasible and therefore impedes informed rational arbitrageurs to trade against mispricing. Thus, real estate returns are prone to...

Over the past decade, the global rise of home-sharing platforms such as Airbnb has catalysed the process of “touristification” in major cities. “Touristification” is a term which has been recently used to describe a process which leads to the transformation of a community into a tourism...

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, work-from-home (WFH) and e-commerce have become much more common in many cities. Many news reports have contended that households are leaving city centres and moving into bigger and better houses in the suburbs or rural areas. This emerging trend has been...