Capital appreciation potentials of Chinese residential market : identification of investment opportunities

The mission of our thesis is to assist residential real estate investors and developers in making more systematic investment decisions when selecting Chinese cities. In particular, our thesis has three major objectives, (1) to understand the residential price appreciation with respect to economic growth among 35 core Chinese cities, (2) to understand the dynamics of the residential market fluctuation, and (3) to predict the residential market movement. Our models have suggested that the residential markets of Tier II Chinese cities shall outperform those of the other tiers in terms of capital appreciation under a sustainable economic growth condition, with Tier I Chinese cities experiencing the least collective growth. Interestingly, our models have suggested that historical performance is a relatively good indicator of medium-term performance, in terms of capital appreciation potentials, under an up-market cycle. Our results have indicated that the capital appreciation performance ranking of our 5-year prediction period to 2012 are relatively consistent with the capital appreciation performance ranking of the historical 9-year trend between 1999 and 2007. In particular, our top five cities with the highest capital appreciation for the 5-year period to 2012 are Xiamen, Ningbo, Nanchang, Taiyuan, and Fuzhou, respectively; in comparison, the top five cities with highest capital appreciation for the 9-year period to 2007 are Ningbo, Xiamen, Qingdao, Nanchang, and Xian, respectively.