Research on the Measurement Method of Benchmark Price of Rental Housing

China’s rental housing market has just started to develop in recent years. It is relatively imperfect and lacks a clear reference for the pricing of rents, which is not fully transparent. A study on the rent formation mechanism of rental housing has policy implications for the construction of a guiding price for the rental housing market and the establishment of a reference basis for the pricing of subsidized housing. Referring to the definition of a benchmark land price, we use data from Beijing to innovatively introduce the concept of benchmark rent. Based on hedonic price theory and the driving factors of benchmark rent, a system of indicators is constructed to explore the mechanism of influencing factors at meso and micro levels on the benchmark rent of market-based rental housing. After LaGrange and robustness tests, it is found that the spatial error model (SEM) is more suitable for benchmark rent determination. We conclude that benchmark rents are affected by spatial relationships caused by spatial heterogeneity and dependency, and that there is significant spatial variation in the factors affecting market-based rental housing benchmark rents. The determination of the benchmark rent can be used as a guiding signal for the market, as a clear signal expectation for the market, government, and tenants.