The housing sales market in China has flourished and gained considerable interest, while the housing rental market has lagged behind and been ignored over the past two decades. With the acceleration of urbanization, the housing rental demand is rising rapidly. Exploring and comparing the influencing factors on housing sale prices and rental prices has significance for sustainable urban planning and management. Using house purchase transaction and rent transaction data in 2017, as well as the average housing price and rent data in 2016 in Beijing, China, this paper compares the spatial distribution and it employs the hedonic price model and quantile regression model to quantify the average and distributional effects of micro-level influencing factors on housing prices and housing rents. Results show that housing prices and housing rents both have a decentralized distribution with multiple centers, but rents of residential communities with high housing prices may not necessarily be high. Both homeowners and renters prefer properties with good structural, locational, and neighborhood characteristics, as well as a good school attendance zone, whereas they still differ in terms of preferences. Homeowners prefer a higher-quality living environment. Renters are more concerned with proximity to an employment center and public transit convenience. Moreover, the price premium of school quality for homeowners exceeds the premium for renters. Higher-priced homeowners or renters differ in the preferences from lower-priced homeowners or renters. Higher-priced homeowners and higher-priced renters are more willing to live in property with a larger number of bedrooms, proximity to a major employment center, park, or school, as well as a location in a school attendance zone with higher school quality.

Production–Living–Ecological Space (PLES) is a useful tool to identify land use status patterns and optimize land resource allocation. In this study, the spatial econometric model was chosen to analyze the driving factors of land use change in Chaoyang District, part of the rural–urban fringe in Beijing, from the perspective of PLES evolution, from 2005 to 2020. The results showed the following: (1) Production Space (PS) to Living-Non-Farm Production Space (LNPS) has been the most significant conversion process of PLES since 2005, making LNPS the PLES type with the highest proportion in the study area. (2) With the spatial order from near-to-far from the city center, the scale of PS was reduced and concentrated, Ecological Space (ES) was formed in a green belt at the periphery of Beijing, Eco-Agricultural Production Space (EAPS) and Living-Agricultural Production Space were rapidly reduced, and LNPS was rapidly expanded in the point-line-plane order. (3) The PS to LNPS conversion was mainly driven by economic development and industrial structure upgrades, while the PS to ES conversion was mainly due to the distribution of population density and also industrial structures. The conversion of EAPS to LNPS was driven by the increase of the urbanization rate and economic growth. This study confirmed the policy-driven effect of the conversion from PS to ES. Due to the “Concentric Circle” spatial structure of Beijing, the conversion of PLES is generally related to the distance from the city center.

Multiple-home ownership has become an increasingly common phenomenon in Chinese cities. In addition to the purposes that have been widely discussed, such as leisure and investment, households may also choose to purchase additional homes for their children. Whether families adjust the consumption of multiple homes according to the gender of their children has a profound impact on housing inequality and gender inequality. Using household-level data from urban China, we investigate how and why having sons and daughters differentially affects the household tenure choice of multiple homes. We found a robust and positive impact of having sons on multiple-home ownership. Having at least one unmarried son of marriageable age significantly increases a family’s consumption of and demand for additional homes. The results are mainly heterogeneous across families with different levels of intra-family resources. We confirm the mechanism behind the positive effect of adult unmarried sons on multiple-home ownership reflects the differentiated strategies developed by parents for the marriage of their sons.

Based on transaction data at the parcel level in Beijing, this paper itemizes the costs incurred in the process of transferring rural land to urban development, quantifies the exact magnitude of land appreciation generated in this process and examines how the land wealth is distributed among involved parties. The main findings include the following: first, the land appreciation and the costs incurred in the process of land expropriation and primary development both differ from case to case; second, conventional comparison of the compensation for expropriated land with land granting price substantially overestimates the magnitude of land appreciation; the average and the median land appreciations account for 44.8% and 44.0% of the mean and median prices of granted serviced land, respectively; last, the compensation paid to affected farmers has improved in absolute terms during our study period from 2003 to 2014; however, because the land granting price has been escalating at a faster pace, the land wealth received by local governments has trended up.