Analysis of the Spatiotemporal Heterogeneity of Housing Prices’ Association in China: An Urban Agglomeration Perspective

With the rise of urban agglomerations, regional divergence of China’s real estate market has gradually intensified. City-specialized policies have become the main emphasis for promoting the healthy development of the regional real estate market. By adopting a gravity model, social net-work analysis, and impulse response analysis, this paper examines the spatial-temporal heterogeneity of housing prices’ association in the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Urban Agglomeration (BTH-UA), the Yangtze River Delta Urban Agglomeration (YRDUA), and the Pearl River Delta Urban Agglomeration (PRDUA), which are the most developed urban agglomerations in China. Meanwhile, the formation mechanism of the housing prices’ association network and spillover effect in urban agglomeration were theoretically analyzed. This paper found that (1) significant aggregation phenomena of housing prices were observed in the urban agglomerations; (2) characteristics of overall and individual networks were dynamically heterogeneous. In the BTHUA and the PRDUA, the associations of housing prices were polarized and sparse, while they were more linked and complex in the YRDUA; (3) polycentric network structure has been demonstrated in the urban agglomerations and the spillover effects of central cities varied in intensity and breadth on responding cities and persisted during the lag period. Accordingly, several policy recommendations have been made.