CUSTOMER INTENTION TO PURCHASE REAL ESTATE IN BEIJING, CHINA

Abstract

Throughout the past decades, real estate market in China has expanded a lot along with the fast growth of China’s economy. As capital city and first-tier city of China, the real estate in Beijing is so expensive that it has been considered as the “sky-price”. However, the interesting thing is that there are still many Chinese consumers being eager to purchase the real estate in Beijing. In this respect, although Chinese government has made lots of efforts to regulate this market, the situation is still not positive. Therefore, understanding the reasons why people purchase Beijing’s real estate despite the high price is of significance for both this industry and academics.

This study is executed to reconfirm the relationship between the influencing factors and consumer purchase intention towards real estate in Beijing, China, whereby the objectives of this study are to determine whether the influencing factors of customers` attitude (investment purpose), subjective norm (reference group), perceived behavioral control (price), identification of Beijing citizenship (opportunities to obtain Beijing’s resources) and socio-demographic information (income) will influence the customers` intention to purchase Beijing’s real estate. A conceptual framework is built to construct the relationship between the independent variables and dependent variable. Besides, the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) is applied in this study. 

To develop the research, this study first analyzed the overall real estate associated situation of China, specifically in Beijing. Then, it reviewed the past literature for inspirations and insights. Ahead of doing data analysis, a survey was conducted beforehand in China where three hundred ninety respondents were interviewed by the structured questionnaires to gather information in terms of respondents` awareness, attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioral control, identification of Beijing citizenship as well as their demographic information, where a five (5) point Likert scale which from “Strongly Disagree” to “Strongly Agree” were used to measure respondents` perceptions. Subsequently, the collected data was processed thorough “pilot test”, “descriptive analysis”, “reliability test”, “factor analysis” and “multiple regression analysis”. 

The results indicate that Chinese people have a very good awareness of Beijing’s real estate information; most Chinese people think Beijing’s real estate is worth investing with the belief that such investment will bring them more benefits; and most of them very clearly understand that Chinese government and socialists don’t encourage them to purchase Beijing’s real estate. Moreover, customers` purchase intention has no relationship with perceived behavioral control (price) and socio-demographic information (income); while the factors that have relationship are their attitude (investment purpose), identification of Beijing citizenship (opportunities to obtain Beijing’s resources) and subjective norm (reference group).

Due to the seriousness of China’s real estate market, especially in Beijing, marketers are suggested to know more about Chinese customers and positively respond to the government policies to develop their business in a healthy way. Chinese government is suggested to improve and issue more powerful policies to regulate this market. Besides, it is also suggested that more similar researches be done in different languages (especially English) in the future to further explore China’s real estate market as, currently, China’s economy is developing very fast and people’s attitude towards real estate is also changing everyday.