Purpose - Considering the importance of housing needs to real estate market, domestic studies on real estate prices from the perspective of demand are basically based on macro-data, but relatively few are associated with micro-data of urban real estate demand. We try to find a reliable relation of elasticity of demand and commercial housing market.

Research design, data, and methodology - In this paper, we have derived housing demand theoretic method and have utilized micro-data of residential family housing survey of downtown area in Kunming City in October, 2015 to estimate income elasticity and price elasticity of housing demand respectively and make a comparative analysis.

Results - The results indicate that income elasticity and price elasticity of families with owner-occupied housing are both larger than those of families with rental housing. Income elasticity of housing demand of urban residential families in Kunming is far below the foreign average and eastern coastal cities level, however, the corresponding price elasticity is far higher.

Conclusions - We suggest that housing affordability of urban families in western China are constrained by the level of economic development, and the current housing price level has exceeded the economic affordability and psychological expectation of ordinary residents. Furthermore, noticing the great rigidity of housing demand, the expansion space of housing market for improvement and for commodity is limited.

Root
 1. Introduction
 2. Theoretical Method and Derivation
  2.1. Household Income Estimates
  2.2. Housing Price Estimates
  2.3. Other Commodity Prices
  2.4. Family Population Preference Estimate
  2.5. The Estimate of the Housing Demand Elasticity
 3. Empirical Test and Analysis
  3.1. Data Description
  3.2. The Accurate Definition and Calculation Methodof the Main Variables in the Housing DemandEquation
  3.3. The Estimation of the Housing Demand Elasticityin Kunming
 4. International and Domestic Comparison
 5. Conclusions and Acknowledgements
  5.1. Conclusions
  5.2. Acknowledgements
 Reference
 Appendix

• Hong Zhang(Dean of School of Urban and Environment, School of Urban and Environment, Yunnan University of Finance and Economics, Kunming, Yunnan province, 650000, China) Corresponding Author
• Shaokai Li(Management Science and Engineering, Yunnan University of Finance and Economics)
• Yanhua Kong(Yunnan University of Finance and Economics)