GIS-Based Spatial Autocorrelation Analysis of Housing Prices Oriented towards a View of Spatiotemporal Homogeneity and Nonstationarity: A Case Study of Guangzhou, China

In the past decades, the booming growth of housing markets in China triggers the urgent need to explore how the rapid urban spatial expansion, large-scale urban infrastructural development, and fast-changing urban planning determine the housing price changes and spatial differentiation. It is of great significance to promote the existing governing policy and mechanism of housing market and the reform of real-estate system. At the level of city, an empirical analysis is implemented with the traditional econometric models of regressive analysis and GIS-based spatial autocorrelation models, focusing in examining and characterizing the spatial homogeneity and nonstationarity of housing prices in Guangzhou, China. There are 141 neigborhoods in Guangzhou identified as the independent individuals (named as area units), and their values of the average annual housing prices (AAHP) in (2009–2015) are clarified as the dependent variables in regressing analysis models used in this paper. Simultaneously, the factors including geographical location, transportation accessibility, commercial service intensity, and public service intensity are identified as independent variables in the context of urban development and planning. The integration and comparative analysis of multiple linear regression models, spatial autocorrelation models, and geographically weighted regressing (GWR) models are implemented, focusing on exploring the influencing factors of house prices, especially characterizing the spatial heterogeneity and nonstationarity of housing prices oriented towards the spatial differences of urban spatial development, infrastructure layout, land use, and planning. This has the potential to enrich the current approaches to the complex quantitative analysis modelling of housing prices. Particularly, it is favorable to examine and characterize what and how to determine the spatial homogeneity and nonstationarity of housing prices oriented towards a microscale geospatial perspective. Therefore, this study should be significant to drive essential changes to develop a more efficient, sustainable, and competitive real-estate system at the level of city, especially for the emerging and dynamic housing markets in the megacities in China.