Urban Households’ Heterogeneous Demands for Living Space—From an Empirical Analysis of CHFS

The residential housing demand is the essential driving force for the development of real estate market. In order to predict the urban housing demand in the future, this paper focuses on how the householder’s personal characteristics and the family structure affect the demand for living space. Based on the micro-data of China Household Finance Survey (CHFS), a multiple linear regression model is conducted, and in addition to other conventional factors, this paper creatively incorporates the health status and living experience of householder into the model. After controlling the housing prices, the results show that education, rural living experience of householder and the per capita income of household have significant positive correlation with per capita living space; the number of cohabitants negatively affect the per capita living space; there is a U-shaped relationship between the age of the householder and the per capita living space. Besides, householder’s gender does not have much impact on the living space, but the health status of householder may affect the demand for living space. With the miniaturization of family size, the improvement of education level, and the process of urbanization, more and more people will pursue larger per capita living space, so that the demand for housing area will not drop in a short time.