Ka Shing William Cheung

University of Auckland

Conventional real estate education emphasises the application of knowledge from various disciplines. While this approach has its merits, its efficacy is affected by the stage of development of the discipline referenced. A notable case in point is the adoption of financial technologies (or FinTech) in real estate. How we prepare our next generation...

Purpose This study aims to identify the pandemic’s impact on house rents by applying a rental gradient analysis to compare the pre-and post-COVID-19 periods in Auckland. The micro-level household census data from the Integrated Data Infrastructure of Statistics New Zealand is also applied to scrutinise this WFH trend as a robustness check. Design/...

Co-living was commonly considered inferior compared to single-family occupied homes. However, with the chic of sharing economy and the sophistication of online peer-to-peer accommodation platforms, co-living has become more common and popular nowadays. Yet, there have been very few empirical studies on the co-living discount in rents and the econom...

Capital constraints are a major obstacle that holds back cash-poor households from purchasing a home. A workaround is to compromise the housing size and quality by buying a starter home one can marginally afford first. This study aims to investigate how capital constraints distort the pricing of starter homes. In Hong Kong, the government builds su...

Touristification is an emerging concept used to enable the understanding of how various stakeholders interfere and transform a neighbourhood through tourist activities. This study develops a touristification rent gap theory to examine how an influx of tourists causes an increase in retail rents. We hypothesise that ceteris paribus, a higher tourist...

New Zealand is a multi-ethnic society that embraces multiculturism. Many studies have examined how the concentration of ethnic minorities affects residential property values within small neighbourhoods. However, very few studies have recognised that characteristics of neighbourhoods other than ethnic concentration may cause such price differentials...

Moving homes has long been considered stressful, but how stressful is it? This study is an original attempt to utilise a micro-level individual dataset in the New Zealand Government’s Integrated Data Infrastructure (IDI) to reconstruct the Social Readjustment Rating Scale (SRRS) and thereby measure stress at a whole-of-population level. The effects...

Over the past decade, the global rise of home-sharing platforms, such as Airbnb, has catalysed the process of ‘touristification’ in major tourism cities. Touristification, a term recently used to describe tourism-induced gentrification, leads to a morphological transformation of a community into a tourism commodity. However, less is understood abou...

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 the repeat-sales model, based on more than 66,000 housin...

Understanding risk-adjusted returns in real estate investment are crucial, but little is known about the risk-adjusted returns for direct real estate. This paper examines risk-adjusted total returns by developing an extended capital asset pricing model (CAPM) to investigate whether direct real estate returns compensate for their risk levels. Based...

Neighbourhood effects are often asserted to be attributable to differences in school zones. However, few studies explore the confounding interactions between the quality of school zones and those of neighbourhoods. This study examines whether the effects of school quality interact with neighbourhood effects in determining house price premia. Using...

Property technology has ushered in new possibilities for the real estate industry, including the use of virtual reality (VR) technologies by real estate agents when marketing properties. Previous studies have identified factors in determining purchase intents within a virtual setting, but little is known about how such technologies affect homebuyer...

Real estate markets are known to be less-than-efficient for many reasons, but what roles short-term trading plays are unclear. Do short-term investors bring additional risk to the market and cause prices to deviate from fundamental values? Based on an extensive dataset of property transactions and a policy shock that substantially raised the cost o...

While in many housing studies, Airbnb is evidenced to be a demand driver that leads to a positive effect on property rents and prices, it is also argued that such tourist accommodation in a neighbourhood causes an increase in criminal activities that weigh on its property values. How can we reconcile such contradictory arguments? This research note...

Are people neglecting natural hazards’ risk? The two main mental accounts of how laypeople judge natural hazard risks are the availability heuristic and the affect heuristic. However, these two mental accounts have rarely been compared alongside each other. Using flood hazards, this study argues that the affect heuristic and the availability heuris...

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 of collecting rates and levies. Such official appraisal...

Although interest in sensory atmospheres and urban ambiences has been growing in urban studies, little is known about the economics of such ambiences. In architecture research, urban atmospheres or ambiences have been studied qualitatively through surveys and interviews. So far, the value of ambience has been focused and quantified only for heritag...

Purpose Achieving a balanced tenant mix is a long-standing discourse in the retailing and consumer marketing literature. From the perspective of marketing mix planning, the diversity of tenants is beneficial to the performance of shopping malls. This paper aims to use a revealed preference approach to study empirically the effect of retail tenant m...

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 variable bias. This paper is a practical-oriented study with...

Achieving higher urban density has become a core principle of the contemporary planning profession as a part of sustainable city development. Both positive and negative externalities of housing density are well-recognised in urban studies. However, very little is known about net housing density effects. In planning research, density effects are usu...

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 buyer anchoring biases in relation to the information....

Higher land-use intensity can be achieved by subdividing the land or by subdividing the structure built on it. The former avoids co-ownership but is subject to topographical constraints, whereas the latter (e.g. apartment units) uses each unit of land more efficiently but entails management of the common parts. This study examines a hybrid approach...

Commuting behaviour has been intensively examined by geographers, urban planners, and transportation researchers, but little is known about how commuting behaviour is spatially linked with the job and housing markets in urban cities. New Zealand has been recognised as one of the countries having the most unaffordable housing over the past decade. A...

While governments around the world are embarking on the path to recovery from the COVID-19 crisis, sustainable tourism planning is crucial, in particular in the hospitality sector, which enhances the resilience of destinations. However, many destination management models overlook the role of urban zoning. Little is known about the impacts of land-u...

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 the constant-quality assumption. Design/methodology/app...

Among Asian economies, Hong Kong has experienced the highest real growth in house prices since the 2010s. Two macroprudential measures, namely credit tightening (loan-to-value ratio cap) and transaction taxes (stamp duty), were introduced to cool down the overheated housing market. This study examines and compares their effectiveness based on a set...

Buyers in the property market often use an agent who is employed by the seller to assist their home searches. This unique and widely used agency arrangement in the property market is known as “sellers’ agents”. While principal-agent theory advocates that buyers should directly hire their agents (i.e., buyers’ agents) to do the home-hunting, search...

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 first attempt to identify the pandemic’s impact on house...

Providing affordable housing has become one of China’s key national policy agenda items. The shared-equity model in Hong Kong, implemented since the late 1970s, has assisted many families in owning a home in the public housing market. However, little attention has been paid to their welfare after acquiring their subsidized units. This study aims 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 sentiment-driven behaviours. Will the impacts on asset r...

The scholarly literature in retail proposes various shopper typologies. However, the global retail environment, especially in the United States, is undergoing a metamorphosis. Against the backdrop of changing retail technologies, the onset of ‘de-malling’ trends calls for a re-examination of patronage motives and shopper typologies. A mall intercep...

Buying a home may typically be the biggest lifetime purchase of any individual. People looking to purchase a home are bombarded with messages relating to the housing market every day and the framing of these messages has the potential to affect their purchase decisions. To examine these effects, an experiment was carried out with 620 participants w...

Sale before completion (i.e. presale) is a common practice that real estate developers use to sell residential units. Since presale buyers are unable to inspect uncompleted units, developers may take advantage of asymmetric information and release information about quality to the market selectively. The search theory also suggests that incomplete p...

For centuries, many governments in the Asia-Pacific region have owned all the land resources, and government land auctions were deployed as an essential channel to supply public land. While the government-led approach to land supply is often criticized for lacking sensitivity to changing market conditions, experiments have been conducted to remedy...

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 affordable subsidised housing is when a household first become...

Buying a home for marriage is customary in many societies. Traditionally, therefore, young couples getting married is a key driver of demand for homeownership. Yet the idea of marriage-induced demand for homeownership is a relatively underexplored component of housing price change. We examine the role of marriage-induced demand for homeownership in...

Stigma has been identified as perceived risks in subsiding the value of properties which are actually or potentially defective. Legal claims are often made under the assumption that remediation itself invokes a form of stigma. This study aims to determine whether this purported post-remediation stigma is a genuine phenomenon or not. In New Zealand,...

While almost all travel destinations seek to increase tourists, less attention is paid to balancing the growth in tourists against consequent visitor–resident irritants, which is essential if the objective is to make tourism more sustainable. Overlooking the carrying capacity of a destination is a common mistake committed when formulating travel vi...

Hong Kong as a small city has witnessed a drastic change in the number of short-stay and same-day tourists from Mainland China ever since the relaxation of the tourism policy began in the early 2000’s. This study examines the impacts on the prices of retail space attributed to the substantial increase of cross-border shoppers. Based on a comprehens...

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, regression analysis is applied to compare the housing we...

Examination of the causal relationship between housing price and transaction intensity helps us understand the housing market dynamics better. The housing market is a very unique asset market as demand for housing comes from both demand for investment return and demand for a shelter/accommodation. Empirical analysis on this causal relationship ther...

Occupancy discount is a long-accepted doctrine in literature. Search theory supports such a proposition, but the empirical evidence is mixed. In this study, we revisit this dilemma and put forward an alternative argument that a landlord may exploit tenants who have made non-redeployable investments and charge them an occupancy premium. Based on dat...

Urban land and housing market is a political arena where the government is usually expected by the general public to intervene for the benefit of the society. With the government owning all land in Hong Kong, public land auctions have been an important channel for developers to acquire land for property development, apart from private-led urban reg...

This paper investigates the determinants of student attendance of economics classes. Course‐specific and individual‐specific factors are shown to have significant impacts on class attendance. It was found that female students and overseas students skip classes less often. Surprisingly, students involved in extra‐curricular activities attend classes...