An Empirical Study Investigating the Effects of Attributes on the Condominiums Price in Xi'an by Structural Equation Modeling

The price of a house has to compensate for its varied structural attributes, such as size, number of bathrooms, neighborhood condition, and construction quality. A large body of work has identified the effect of each attribute of the housing price using hedonic price theory. This paper focuses not only on the individual structural attributes, but also on the immeasurable integrated characteristics, such as characteristics of the location, characteristics of the site, characteristics of the building, and characteristics of the dwelling. The effects of these integrated characteristics on the price of condominiums in Xi’an, China have also been explored using the Structural Equation Modeling. The results from the empirical study showed that the location of houses/flats has the greatest effect on their price, and the neighborhood condition along with the district quality plays a more important role in determining the location value than the distance from the city center. The study also found that characteristics of the site and building, especially characteristics of the dwelling, have comparatively smaller effects on the price.