Information Barriers, Housing Searches, and Residential Satisfaction : A Study of Mainland China Students in Hong Kong

There are few empirical studies that study the effects of different housing search methods on housing outcomes. This paper addresses this research gap by surveying students from Mainland China in Hong Kong to measure residential satisfaction in the use of three different housing search strategies: social media, housing agents, and personal social networks (friends and relatives). We use a structural equation model (SEM) to analyze the results and find that students who use social networks to find houses have a significantly higher level of residential satisfaction than those who use social media as a search method. However, using a housing agent does not significantly affect residential satisfaction, although both the number of houses viewed and time spent during a search have small effects on increasing residential satisfaction.