Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

This manuscript is a well-elaborated hedonic price analysis. Hundreds of similar researches are available, however, this one is a great study including all necessary scientific requirements. The research question is valid and the applied methodology is correct. Only concern (as Authors also are indicating it) that the rental database came from listed rent offers instead of real transactions. Suggested to accept it in present form.

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 1 Comments

This manuscript is a well-elaborated hedonic price analysis. Hundreds of similar researches are available, however, this one is a great study including all necessary scientific requirements. The research question is valid and the applied methodology is correct. Only concern (as Authors also are indicating it) that the rental database came from listed rent offers instead of real transactions. Suggested to accept it in present form.

 Point 1: Only concern (as Authors also are indicating it) that the rental database came from listed rent offers instead of real transactions.

Response 1: Many thanks to the reviewer for pointing out the inadequacies of the article. The author will strive to obtain real transaction data in future research to explore the real impact of accessibility on rent.

Reviewer 2 Report

This manuscript needs a significant effort in revision to be considered for publication. Not only the writing is hard to follow, the methodology is also questionable. For example, in Table 2, the coefficient on "Number of Bedrooms" is negative. Does this mean the rent is lower for a larger space? This is very likely caused by the multi-colinearity of the explanatory variables. I also found the scope of the study is very limited as it only focused on a single city. 

Author Response

Response to Reviewer 2 Comments

Dear reviewer：

We are very grateful to the experts for their valuable comments on the paper “Walking accessibility to the bus stop: Does it affect residential rent? The case of Jinan, China", we think your comments are very reasonable and useful. In response to comments made by experts, the authors carefully explained the contents of the article and revised the manuscript. 

Review2：

This manuscript needs a significant effort in revision to be considered for publication. Not only the writing is hard to follow, the methodology is also questionable. For example, in Table 2, the coefficient on "Number of Bedrooms" is negative. Does this mean the rent is lower for a larger space? This is very likely caused by the multi-colinearity of the explanatory variables. I also found the scope of the study is very limited as it only focused on a single city.

Point 1: In Table 2, the coefficient on "Number of Bedrooms" is negative. Does this mean the rent is lower for a larger space? This is very likely caused by the multi-colinearity of the explanatory variables.

Response 1: First of all, I would like to thank the reviewers for their valuable comments on the unreasonable aspects of the text. The authors have confirmed that this problem is caused by the collinearity of the two variables of ‘Number of bedrooms’ and ‘Housing size’ (after removing the ‘Housing size’, the coefficient of ‘Number of bedrooms’ becomes positive). In response to this problem, we have removed the variable of ‘Number of bedrooms’ in the text and rerun the all the regressions in the updated manuscript. The results show that the coefficients of key variables change slightly.

Point 2: I also found the scope of the study is very limited as it only focused on a single city.

Response 2: Many thanks to the reviewers for pointing out the problem. We focus on a single city for two reasons. Firstly, the many existing studies on housing price and rental are mainly conducted from the macro and micro perspective. The studies on micro level mainly focusing on single city are emerging for the rental markets develop dynamically. These individual urban studies can provide abundant cases for fully understanding the relationship between transportation accessibility and rent, and correspondingly provide transportation policy support for the sustainable development of housing market.  There are many studies carried out in cities from China and the other countries, such as Beijing, Guangzhou, Xian in China, Seoul in South Korea, and Houston, USA. Secondly, the study takes Jinan as the case city, compared with other big cities with  developed subway networks, Jinan's bus transportation system is relatively complete, and we attempt to find out how the bus transportation affect the housing rent, therefor we apply the gravity index to assess the walking accessibility on the housing rent. For the measurement of the walking accessibility, the average daily on-ridership data of bus stops is important, making the measurement more accurate and scientific. However, due to the data availability, research scope is limited in Jinan. In order to reduce the one-sidedness of the conclusion based on a single city, we also compare some conclusions with other city studies. Of course, in future studies, we would like to expand the research scope to multiple cities to test the reliability and robustness of the research conclusions. If we do not fully interpret your comments, please contact us.

Point 3: Extensive editing of English language and style required.

Response 3: Many thanks to the reviewers for pointing out the problems, and the authors have carefully explained the contents of the article and revised the manuscript. We have polished the paper. Please check the editing certificate (Please see the attachmen) .

 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Comments

Major

1. Abstract was not informative so should be rewritten. First, it did not reveal the quantified influence in numbers. For example, how significantly did walking accessibility to bus stop affect housing rent? Do you have a number such as 5% or 10%? Second, English needs polishing (e.g., the tense is not correct).
2. More references are needed for certain statements (policies and definitions), such as line 36-38, line 44-48, line 52-54. Especially concerning line 118-121, how did you come up with such a conclusion? Where was the source? Please check throughout the paper.
3. Line 128, what are the other analysis methods? Is it the same as the other research methods in the abstract? Please indicate them explicitly and keep consistency throughout the paper.
4. No references in section 2.1.1. Please add a figure of the study area.
5. Why distance to CBD is categorised into the locational attribute in Table 1? What is the difference between the locational and neighbourhood attributes?
6. Line 192-206, there is repetition concerning the formula description. Please delete the irrelevant statements.
7. Line 513-514, for 1% increase in walkability, only 0.0229% (global) and 0.016% (GWR) increase in rent were observed. That is a nuanced amount, does it really make a change? Besides, the R square in global regression is not convincing (around 0.47) for you to come up with that conclusion.

Minor

1. English needs extensive polishing regarding grammar and tense. For example, line 104, have should be had.
2. Line 15 and 20. Delete the quotation mark.
3. The font in Tables 1 and 2 should be consistent with the rest of the paper.
4. The first time you mention a phrase that can be abbreviated, spell it out in full and provide the abbreviation in parentheses. For example, POI in line 154.
5. The legend in figure 1 (Yuan/m2) should be corrected.

Author Response

Please see the attachment,thank you!

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors have made efforts in revising the manuscript, especially from the English perspective. While I believe this paper still has a lot of room for improvement, I am not sure how much more the authors can do within a short period of time. I will leave it to the Editor to make the final decision.  

Author Response

Dear reviewer：

We are very grateful to you for your valuable comments on the paper “Walking accessibility to the bus stop: Does it affect residential rents? The case of Jinan, China", we think your comments are very reasonable and useful. In response to comments made by experts, the authors carefully explained the contents of the article and revised the manuscript. If we do not fully interpret your comments, please contact us, we would appreciate it very much.

 

 

Point1：The authors have made efforts in revising the manuscript, especially from the English perspective. While I believe this paper still has a lot of room for improvement, I am not sure how much more the authors can do within a short period of time. I will leave it to the Editor to make the final decision.

 

Response 1: Thank you very much for your valuable comments. We made further refinements in the manuscript such as English writing, abstract, introduction, methods etc. to improve this paper. We also supplemented 4 related references [21,22,23,25] to the text.

 

Regarding the study method of this paper, in order to enhance the reliability of the research method, we made two improvements. First, to test the multicollinearity of the variables, we added the variance inflation factor (VIF) of the variables to the OLS regression, the results were shown in Table 2 ; Secondly, we supplemented the description of research methods of each influencing factor in Table 1.