Government Building Relocations and Housing Market Responses: from a signalling theory perspective

This study employs a static difference-in-differences method to investigate the effects of government building relocations on housing prices and the underlying mechanism, using 58,321 housing transaction records from Shanghai, China, spanning 2012 to 2024. Our results show that government building relocations are associated with a 3–4% decrease in housing prices in the relocated-from areas, but a 1–3% increase in the relocated-to areas relative to nearby comparison neighbourhoods. Mechanism analysis further shows that transaction volumes in nearby communities increase significantly after relocation, suggesting that households pay greater attention to properties located near government buildings.