Hedonic Pricing of Houses in Megacities Pre- and Post-COVID-19: A Case Study of Shanghai, China

Abstract

Housing price is one of the most concerning issues to the public worldwide. Studying the spatial characteristics of Shanghai’s housing prices and their explanatory factors is of great practical significance, for Shanghai is the largest city in China and serves as the national economic center and a global financial hub. By crawling the point of interest (POI) data from the Lianjia Real Estate and Gaode Map in the past decade and applying the multiscale geographically-weighted regression (MGWR) model, this study deeply explores the spatial characteristics of housing prices and their main influencing variables in Shanghai before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Results show that housing prices in Shanghai kept rising even under the shock of the pandemic, especially in high-priced housing. After the pandemic, Shanghai’s housing price market polarization intensified. In addition, housing prices are very sensitive to location and have strong spatial heterogeneity. The influencing effects of different explanatory factors vary perceptibly in spatial heterogeneity as well as pre- and post- COVID-19.