Purpose – This paper aims to construct rental housing indices and identify market segmentation for moreeffective property-management strategies.

Design/methodology/approach – The hedonic model was employed to construct the rental indices. Usingthe k-meansþþ and REDCAP (Regionalisation with Dynamically Constrained Agglomerative Clustering andPartitioning) approaches, the authors conducted clustering analysis and identified different marketsegmentation. The empirical study relied on the database of 80,212 actual rental transactions in Beijing,China, spanning 2016–2018.

Findings – Rental housing market segmentation may distribute across administrative boundaries. Properlysegmented indices could provide a better account for the heterogeneity and spatial continuity of rental housingand as well be crucial for effective property management.

Research limitations/implications – Residential rent might not only vary over space but also interplayswith housing price. It would be worth studying how the rental market functions together with the owneroccupied sector in the future.

Practical implications – Residential rental indices are of great importance for policymakers to be able toevaluate housing policies and for property managers to implement competitive strategies in the rental market. Their constructions largely depend on the analysis of market segmentation, a trade-off between housing spatialheterogeneity and continuity.

Originality/value – This paper fills the gap in knowledge concerning segmented rental indices construction,particularly in China. The spatial constrained clustering approach (REDCAP) was also initially introduced toidentify regionalised market segmentation due to its superior performance.

In China, the capitalization of education resources in housing prices has been widely discussed. However, insufficient attention is paid to it in rents. Thus, this paper mainly aims to identify the capitalization of school quality in rents. It estimates a hedonic treatment effects model by introducing the propensity score matching (PSM) method. The empirical analysis is based on 49,438 rental transaction data of 2016–2018 in Beijing, China. It finds that school quality can be significantly capitalized in rents across different school quality (ranked as 1st-class, 2nd-class, and popular-class), space, and time. Besides, quality school density (the number of quality schools) within neighborhoods can significantly moderate the nearest school’s capitalization, promoting a 3.5% capitalization increase in outer municipal districts but a 3% decrease in inner districts. The popular-class schools can be capitalized into the rent of inner districts, probably because of other exogenous factors (e.g., housing prices, public transit). In addition, the equitable housing policy might show a potential risk in worsening social inequality between homeowners and renters in the municipal areas with high competition for 1st-class schools. In contrast, it may remedy such inequality in outer districts with less competition for quality schools.

The relationship between housing prices or rents with other economic factors has been widely analysed. However, few studies use cross-sectional data to analyse the relationship between owner-occupied and rental housing sectors. This paper aims to develop a cross-sectional rent-price model and estimate the interconnected relationship between different market segments. Based on the transactional data of owner-occupied and rental housing in 2015–2018 in Beijing, China, we empirically conduct analyses of cross-sectional rent-price interconnectivity in total housing markets and segments such as housing size and school district. As expected, we find a bi-directional relationship between prices and rents in Beijing that goes in both directions, indicating that housing of different tenures substitute each other, and substitutional effects are significantly different across submarkets. Condominium prices have a more significant impact on rents than vice versa.

In China, tenants' residential relocations always present diverse spatial-temporal tendencies and are highly influenced by disadvantages of origin (push) and attractiveness of destination (pull). This paper aims to construct a relocation intention (RI) model and estimate the effects of residential push–pull factors on tenants' RI, such as the household registration system (hukou), homeownership status, and residential dissatisfaction. The empirical research relies on a questionnaire-based survey of 2,187 tenants conducted in 2019 in Beijing, China. Our findings confirm that non-local hukou status significantly pushes female and unmarried tenants to relocate, and non-local homeownership noticeably pulls male and married tenants' relocation. These two factors also significantly influence the RI of tenants without higher education. For tenants younger than 35, non-local hukou status shows a strong pushing force, but non-local homeownership does not present notable differences by age. Additionally, residential dissatisfaction significantly pushes tenants' RI and has a moderating effect on non-local homeownership. Moreover, for tenants who have explicit relocation intentions, non-local hukou status plays a vital role in shortening their intended stay before their actual relocation.