Research on the Housing Affordability of University Graduates in Guangzhou

For a long time, the housing affordability of urban residents is a focus of the real estate research. Analysing the residents’ housing affordability is the premise to make appropriate housing policies, release the housing needs of low-income groups continuously, and promote economic growth. Housing security policy often ignored new university graduates, an urban sandwich generation, who could not afford the housing by their slender incomes. In this paper, university graduates’ housing affordability is evaluated by two indices: one is the Residual Income Affordability (RIA), a common tool to estimate the housing affordability; the other is Housing Affordability Time (HAT), an original evaluation index established in this study. Sensitivity analysis is applied to housing price, graduates’ salary, loan interest rate, purchase tax, and first payment proportion to find out the important impact factors for graduates’ housing affordability. This study finds that university graduates, the dominant force of urban development, have weak housing affordability and should be paid more attention by the society. According to the characteristics of university graduates, suggestions of housing security and financial policies are proposed in this paper.