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 visa policies. Overtourism is a term recently used to contextualize this potential hazard to many popular tourist destinations worldwide. One notable case in point is the “multiple-entry permit” policy implemented in Hong Kong which is causing conflicts between mainland Chinese visitors and Hong Kong residents. To investigate the overtourism phenomenon in Hong Kong we develop a hysteresis model. We hypothesized that ceteris paribus, the implementation of a “multiple-entry permit” policy would lead to an overwhelming growth in day-trippers and cause a permanently negative cointegrating relationship with residents’ sentiment. We confirmed our hypothesis by using the bound tests of Autoregressive-Distributed Lag models. Our findings suggest that policymakers should note that the deterioration in visitor–resident relations from overtourism may exhibit a significant hysteresis effect that will persist far beyond the original stimulus. “Developing resilience in tourism” and “exploring sustainable degrowth” are discussed as potential strategies for long-term tourism growth.

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 prices by applying a price gradient analysis to the COVID-19 epicentre in China. Considering microlevel housing transaction data in 62 areas from nine districts in Wuhan City from January 2019 to July 2020, the hedonic pricing and the price gradient models suggest that there was, respectively, a 4.8% and a 5.0–7.0% year-on-year fall in house prices immediately after the pandemic outbreak. Although house prices rebounded after the lockdown period, the gradient models show that the price gradients were flattened from the epicentre to the urban peripherals. The price premiums in high-density areas were also substantially discounted after the city’s lockdown. Our findings are robust to different model specifications. The implication is that the risk associated with the pandemic is localised and transitory in nature. People may be able to internalise the risk by residing in low-density residential areas.

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 homebuyers’ purchase decisions. In this study, a family-home purchase decision-making model is used to conceptualise how VR can affect buyers’ involvement in the property purchasing process. Using transaction data from Wuhan City, China, the study found that a 1% increase in the number of followers visiting an online property portal resulted in a 21% increase in physical home visits. The study also indicates that VR tours shorten the marketing time of property by 6.4% and narrow the bid-ask spread by 2%, ceteris paribus. These findings suggest that emerging property technologies such as VR can enhance the purchase decision-making process and reshape the role of the real estate agent.

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 Hong Kong, a relatively self-contained housing market with fewer options for migration than most large cities. We use an instrumental variable strategy to test the hypothesis that more unmarried individuals at the prime age for marriage increases housing prices. We find that an additional one thousand marriage-aged but unmarried individuals leads to a seven per cent increase in housing prices. These findings confirm the importance of demographic factors such as cohort size and marriage rates on housing price projections, housing needs assessments, and housing policy.

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 regeneration. For a long time before 1997, the government of Hong Kong supplied land to the market via a supply-oriented model which was entirely dependent on the willingness of government to sell. The situation changed in 1997 when the administration found that they were being unresponsive, and switched to a demand-oriented supply model, the Application List System. In any case, there is a general expectation in the society that government urban land policy in supplying land should have a major bearing on the housing market, especially in making housing more affordable by the general working class. By applying a Granger causality framework, we find this expectation unrealistic as there is no evidence supporting the claim that changing land supply via government land sale programme would impact on housing prices. However, it is found that housing prices do Granger-cause land supply under the Application List System which implies that private sector is more responsive to market changes than the government, which is ironic as the government decided to abandon this model and revert back to the old supply-oriented model in 2013. We conclude that the political economy of the urban land market has made the land supply model too subjective and dependent on government agenda, which is not a health development towards a more optimal urban land policy.

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 intercept survey was used to collect data from 297 shoppers in shopping malls in Hong Kong. A principal components analysis was used to evaluate the validity of mall attributes, and a cluster analysis was conducted to classify shoppers with similar perceived channels. Under the self-determination theory, the shopper types were profiled based on the basic human needs of competence, relatedness and autonomy. This study helps long-term strategic planning for retail space to incorporate marketing channels. Retailers that devise marketing strategies in the shopping mall environment must consider the customer-centric approach. Future research may focus on other retail formats to understand shoppers’ perceptions.