Megacity regions mark a transformative phase of urbanisation, in which interconnected cities undergo land-use and land-cover change (LUCC) that extends beyond administrative boundaries. However, the drivers of cross-boundary LUCC remain insufficiently examined, particularly before the top-down regional integration. The Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) provides a clear empirical case, having experienced cross-boundary LUCC prior to its formal designation as a megacity region in 2018. This study builds a Landsat-derived LUCC and driver dataset for the GBA. Global and local spatial autocorrelation (Moran’s I and LISA) are used to characterise spatial structure and clustering, and geographically weighted regression identifies the socio-economic and environmental determinants of built-up expansion over 1980–2018, spanning the pre-reform decade and the post-1990 land-transfer era. Findings reveal that: (1) LUCC in the GBA already exhibited a cross-border, spatially networked expansion pattern before formal regional integration policies at the national level, with built-up area growth extending beyond core cities into decentralised urban nodes. Two prominent cross-border cores and one cross-administrative core emerged, suggesting that regional integration was co-led by market forces and local governments before an institutional framework was established. (2) Although the GBA showed a clear trend towards integrated development, urban expansion was highly uneven. Such spatial disparities were mainly driven by varying socioeconomic and natural factors, including gross domestic product, population growth, real estate investment, water resource proximity, and infrastructure development. These findings enhance understanding of megacity-region dynamics and offer insights from the GBA for cross-border urbanisation and sustainable spatial governance.

Cities are the engines of growth, fuelled by economic activities, much of which are conducted through real estate assets and by real estate investments as a major part of the broader global capital market. Although cities are the primary recipients of global capital, most studies on foreign investments, including those on real estate investments, have focused on explaining drivers, directions and impacts of trade flows between countries, not cities. Especially for commercial real estate, cities matter most. To address this research gap, we study the factors impacting the bilateral Foreign Real Estate Investment (FREI) flows between global cities by employing the gravity framework. We compile a panel data covering 715 pairs of global cities from 2007 to 2021. We use the Poisson Pseudo-Maximum-Likelihood (PPML) estimator with controls for unobserved heterogeneity. We find that, along with standard negative impact of geographic distance, the economic size, competitiveness and institutional development and common official language are the main factors associated with higher FREI flows. Interestingly, cultural distance, after controlling for the common official language, is associated with higher flows, demonstrating the complexity of cultural factors in FREI investments. Our results provide novel insights into FREI at the city level that can be utilised by national and local governments in their devising local as well as broader capital market policies.