What is in a name? A modern interpretation from housing price in Hong Kong

Abstract

Hong Kong is a metropolitan city. Owing to its historical back-ground as a former British colony, it is characterised by a mixture of Chinese and Western cultures. While most housing estates’ names are bilingual in Chinese and English, many recent large scale housing estates have an English name only. Do housing estates with an English name only associate with higher prices than bilingual ones? To the best of our knowledge, none have studied that before. We attempted to fill this research gap. Four large-scale residential projects in Yuen Long District were selected, two are bilingual and two have English names only. 253,605 data points, including macroeconomic variables and housing character-istics, were included in this study. The results of the hedonic price model showed that properties with English names only were associated with a higher price than bilingual ones. We also utilised a long short-term memory (LSTM) housing price prediction model to predict housing price. Our research results show that housing estates with English names only are associated with higher housing price. It provides a new perspective on real estate housing estates’ brand management and provide a reference for real estate buyers in the future.