Urban inhabitants’ housing choice behavior affects urban residential spatial structure. Further more urban inhabitants’ housing choice behavior is relevant to segregation on residential spatial structure, race discrimination, residential mobility and suburbanization. So many scholars pay more attention to housing choice behavior. This paper mainly introduces the theory frame of housing choice behavior research and methodology and important models
Housing market and inhabitant’s social attributes influence residential location decision process and relocation choice behaviors. Housing’ location is fixed and housing is expensive and everlasting. So present stock and developing trend of housing market determine household’s residential location decision process and household’s relocation choice behavior. Inhabitants’ social attributes include income, profession, age, education degree, household structure, race and religion. Inhabitant’s location process exhibits some regular spatial preferences because of age, household scale, income and workplace.
There has been a sharp dichotomy between micro-level and macro-level analyses in past research. Under assumption of utility maximum, micro-level research mainly focuses on mechanism of consumer housing choice behavior. On the contrary, macro-level research mainly focuses on equilibrium of housing market, the relationship between mobility probability, population, income and present housing condition.
This paper mainly introduces main residential location decision process and relocation choice behavior models and authors make some comments on them.