The institution of property rights, as an important category of constraints or restrictions on human behaviour, provides rules of competition, and delineates the social and legal relationship between a resource owner and the others throughout the world. Forms of ownership rights to resources affect the efficiency of their use. The consensus is that in a real world with significant transactions costs and scarce resources, private property right systems lead to more efficient resource allocation than the others do. Previous studies about economic implications of non-exclusive resources have focused on the problems of resource misallocations. A few studies also worked on the effects that alternate property rights structures have on the prices and variations in prices of non-exclusive resources. However, the economic analysis of property rights attribute of natural resources used as building materials, such as natural sand and wood, is still an unexplored research area. The objective of the whole research is to empirically verify Angello and Donnelley's (1975) property rights thesis, as reinterpreted by Lai (1993a) and Lai and Yu (1995), that the variations in prices of non-exclusive resources are much greater than those under more exclusive ownership; and to identify, alternatively, the factors that might have affected ownership rights, inferred from changes in the variations in prices of the resources. In this thesis, published historical data of natural sand, Total declared costs of new buildings completed, Gross & Usable floor area, Gross value of construction work, and published government data of prices for selected buildings materials, namely Portland cement, sand, hardwood, and plywood, were used. The prices of captured and cultured shrimps, which are collected from super market and street market by the author, were also checked and used. These resources are subject to different degrees of access restrictions and, hence, are good candidates for testing the hypotheses. Basically, the hypotheses formulated in this research are strongly supported. The main findings are that the variations in prices of non-exclusive resources are greater than those of exclusive resources; for the same resource, the price ratios of exclusive resource and non-exclusive resource would fall over time. This is an original contribution to the theory of property rights. The originality of this dissertation lies in its exploration of the economic relationship between property rights ownership and selected building materials, as well as in the application of variances to the research of building materials. This is a novel contribution to research on Hong Kong’s sustainable development as she heavily relies on the real estate market for economic development. / published_or_final_version / Real Estate and Construction / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy