Understanding the Value of Amenities: A Study of the Land Value Determination Process in Hangzhou, China

Abstract

This paper seeks to investigate the determinants of land value within Hangzhou China. There are two main goals that the research paper will attempt to address. The first is to build upon existing research on land pricing in terms of the theories outlined by the monocentric city and hedonic pricing models. Second, the paper will use a dataset of Hangzhou land sales transactions between the years of 2003 and 2011 to investigate the possible existence of “luxury residuals” among commercial and residential land parcels. After evaluating the data with OLS Regressions, the results suggest that both environmental and convenience-­‐based amenities have significant influence on pricing. Nonetheless, due to the presence of large residuals, while the regression results offer important insight on the impact of amenities, the extent to which Chinese consumers value certain amenities is not fully captured by these results. Rather, a number of case studies of outliers are used to fully examine the influences of these amenity variables in driving such extreme prices. The results support the hypothesis that China, located at the bottom of Kuznets environmental curve, values amenities at extreme levels as a result of scarcity.