Residential areas play an important role in the formation of the urban heat island (UHI). Many studies adopted hypothetical or simplified models to analyze UHI in residential areas based on numerical simulation. Nevertheless there is still a lack of an accurate and efficient method to obtain typical residential district models with regional characteristics. This paper presented an analytical method to determine the typical residential district model which can provide a baseline model for analyzing the relationship between residential planning indicators and UHI. Using a case study approach, this study collected residential information (including site size, layout type, building size, building orientation, building density, average building height and building interval) from 97 residential districts constructed in Nanning (a southern city of China), and obtained four typical residential district models. The applicability of the proposed method was discussed in terms of heat island intensity (HII) for the typical residential district models with actual residential districts using a numerical simulation tool (ENVI-met). The simulation results showed that the average difference of HII values was less than 0.1 °C. It was found that the proposed method can provide a baseline model for predicting the residential thermal environment at the scheme design stage.