Housing Acquisition Process for Public Housing and Commodity Housing in Shanghai : A Survey for Residents

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the housing acquisition process by providing profiles of residents in Shanghai. A questionnaire was prepared for residents in both public housing and commodity housing to analyze the relationship between the purchase prices of housing units and the annual household incomes of the buyers. The ability to purchase private condominium units depends on whether the purchasers already possess any real properties. In Shanghai, the number of condominiums supplied by private developers has been rapidly increasing in recent years and represented about 40% of the number of households in 2009. However, as these prices are about 9 to 14 times the average annual household income, we believe that a path from renting public housing to owning commercial housing, which was a relocation process commonly witnessed in the 1980s in Japan, is considerably difficult to be followed by regular residents in Shanghai.