Meanwhile, according to the National New-type Urbanization Plan 2014–2020, the percentage of China’s urban portion of the total population was expected to rise by 1% per year to reach 60% by 2020. This notable global event may be the greatest human-resettlement experiment in human history. China’s urban population changed from 17.9% of the total population in 1978 to 54.8% in 2014. In the past three decades, unprecedented urbanization occurred in China and this phenomenon has attracted the attention of many researchers.
These results underscore the importance of taking spatially varying effects of major driving factors into account in policy-making on regional land market. It was found that the GDP had more significant influence on residential land price than other factors and the influence of the three factors to overall variation in residential land price increased over the three studied years. A geographical detector was used to examine the relative importance of factors to residential land price. Conversely, the areas with negative correlation between investment in residential buildings and residential land price gradually expanded in size over time. The negative effects of immigrant population on residential land price were mainly concentrated in the cities around the Bohai Rim and the area with negative effects gradually shrank in the three studied years.
Results show that the areas in which GDP had relatively strong positive impacts on residential land price expanded with time. In this study we provided a perspective analysis of the changes of residential land prices in 2008, 20 based on the land price monitoring records of 105 cities and then conducted a geographically weighted regression (GWR) analysis on the relationships between residential land price and three major impact factors (i.e., immigrant population, gross domestic product (GDP) and investment in residential buildings). Yet, there has only been a limited amount of attempts made to model and analyze the regional dynamic changes of residential land price systematically, especially in term of the spatially varying effects of key demographic and economic factors. The very high and continuously rising residential land prices in many cities are causing significant challenges to economic development and social stability. With the rapid development of land marketization in China, the spatial patterns of residential land prices in different regions have become increasingly complicated.