IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/arz/wpaper/eres2025_249.html

How COVID-19 Reshaped Cross-Border Consumption Dynamics: Evidence from Hong Kong’s Retail Property Market

Author

Listed:
  • Siu Kei (Kelvi Wong
  • Yidi Yang
  • Lok Yiu Leung

Abstract

Cross-border travel functions as a form of shopping tourism, fulfilling both individual economic needs and leisure pursuits while substantially contributing to the valuation of retail property—a critical subsector of real estate. As an international financial hub and China's Special Administrative Region (SAR), Hong Kong possesses a distinctive retail ecosystem tailored for cross-border consumption. The cross-border flow between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, its neighboring city within China's Greater Bay Area, has historically served as a vital socioeconomic connection, although it was suspended during the COVID-19 pandemic due to public health precautions. This study investigates the impact of cross-border travel on the performance of Hong Kong’s retail property market, focusing on the periods before the pandemic-induced lockdown and after the reopening of border checkpoints. By analyzing retail property performance indicators and transaction data, our findings reveal that the retail property market is more strongly influenced by inbound travelers-specifically, mainland tourists visiting Hong Kong- than by outbound travelers, namely Hong Kong residents traveling to Shenzhen. In addition, the more significant price decline in shopping areas after the reopening suggests that the retail market performance is particularly sensitive to inbound travel. These findings offer policymakers actionable insights for designing tourism strategies to revitalize Hong Kong's retail sector.

Suggested Citation

  • Siu Kei (Kelvi Wong & Yidi Yang & Lok Yiu Leung, 2025. "How COVID-19 Reshaped Cross-Border Consumption Dynamics: Evidence from Hong Kong’s Retail Property Market," ERES eres2025_249, European Real Estate Society (ERES).
    • Handle: RePEc:arz:wpaper:eres2025_249
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://eres.architexturez.net/doc/oai-eres-id-eres2025-249-0
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    ;
    ;
    ;
    ;

    JEL classification:

    • R3 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Real Estate Markets, Spatial Production Analysis, and Firm Location

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:arz:wpaper:eres2025_249. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Architexturez Imprints (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/eressea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.