Abstract: Chinese real estate industry has been developing very quickly, but imbalanced, since the start of real estate reform three decades ago. Most of the investments have been focusing on the regions with well-developed urban economies, attractive economic environment, better infrastructures and public services, and better living conditions, which gradually lead to bigger and bigger spatial differences in real estate development among the different regions. Rational real estate development can provide people with moderate housing condition, but irrational and imbalanced development will hinder the efforts to improve housing condition. It is important to explore the relationship between real estate development and housing condition. In this paper, we first established a number of comprehensive assessment indicators for real estate development and housing condition, and then calculated the degree of coordination and coupling development between real estate development and housing condition improvement. The spatial pattern of the degrees of coordination and development of the 286 prefectural cities showed that: (1) Coordination degree between real estate development and housing condition in most prefectural cities is at medium level, with an average number of 0.59, indicating that the two subsystems are still in an adjustment phase and have not yet established a coordinated and mutually reinforcing dynamic relationship. (2) Coupling development degree between two subsystems in most prefectural cities is still at a lower level. There are significant disparities between eastern coastal areas and western inland areas. Based on degrees of coordination and coupling development, the 286 prefectural cities can be divided into nine categories, namely, well developed and coordinated area, well developed and adjusting area, well developed but conflicting area, developed and coordinated area, developed and adjusting area, developed but conflicting area, under developed but coordinated area, under developed and adjusting area, under developed and conflicting area. (3) One of the key tasks for the economy in 2013 is to actively and steadily promote urbanization, strive to improve the quality of urbanization, and firmly adhere to the real estate control policies. These seemingly contradictory and complex tasks should be undertaken with prudence and flexibility as well as positive and moderate attitude. Considering the significant disparities among the different regions in China, the government can take the measures that suit the local conditions, such as different financial policies, price guidelines and administrative decisions. The central and local governments should play different functions but work together and establish an effective information-sharing mechanism. In other words, to make joint efforts to achieve coordination between the real estate development and housing condition improvement, the central government should formulate the policies, determine the objectives, and monitor the results; local governments should have the right to choose the suitable means and ways to achieve specific goals, and accept supervisions from the higher level government and respond to the attentions from the public for evaluation of the policies and fulfillment of the obligations.

Key words: China, coupling development, housing condition, real estate development, spatial analysis