Analysis of Influencing Factors for Urban Land Price and Its Changing Trend in China in Recent Years

There are many factors affecting the level of land price and its changing trends, and these factors may fluctuate from time to time according to social and economic development and people's demands. In this paper, hierarchical linear models were employed to quantitatively measure the influences and interactions of 10 factors which were chosen in three aspects of urban land supply and demand and farmland protection policy, including real estate investment, population density, urban construction land area, new area for land transfer, arable land occupation tax, new construction land use fee. The level-1 and level-2 models constitute an individual development model using quarterly land price data of 105 cities of China with well-developed land markets from 2008 to 2010 and municipal influencing factors data, aiming to explore the way these factors affect the urban land price and its growth rate. The level-2 and level-3 models constitute an organization model, intending to explore contribution degree of the provincial factors chosen in this paper to land price and its growth rate. The results showed that there are multi-level factors affecting urban land price and its growth rate, and the interclass correlation coefficient shows that 12.45% of the difference in urban land price comes from provincial "background effect". Influencing factors of urban land price and its growth rate are different, and their dominant influencing factors have significant difference. Six municipal influencing factors chosen in this paper explained 82.07% of the difference in urban land price altogether, while 62.75% of the difference in urban land price growth rate. This illustrates that changes in land price growth rate is more "rational" than those of land price. Real estate investment explained 79.90% of the difference in urban land price, being the biggest influencing factor of all the municipal factors, which is the direct driving force of land prices rising. Meanwhile, both urban construction land area and real estate investment have a significant influence on land price growth rate. Farmland protection policies have a significant effect on controlling the level of land price and its growth rate. Concretely, new construction land use fee and arable land occupation tax are two of the most notable land price influencing factors at the provincial level.