Cat Foreheads & Rabbit Hutches

Point of interest

On September 5, Sankei Shimbun ran a story that’s gotten a lot of attention. Sankei reports that the homeowning rate among Japanese people in their 20s is the highest it has ever been. The reason is the skyrocketing price of real estate in major urban regions, in particular the Tokyo metropolitan area, and an increase in interest rates for housing loans that may go even higher in the future. The idea is to buy now before properties and loans become too expensive, and now that some banks are offering 50-year loans it becomes a bit easier, at least theoretically.

The communications ministry says that the home ownership rate in 2025 among households where the head-of-household is in their 20s was 40.7 percent, the highest on record. Sankei reports that experts tend to recommend you not buy a home whose price is more than 6 times your annual income, but according to the job search magazine Recruit, in the Tokyo metropolitan area prices for new condominiums are going for 8 times the average annual income, regardless of age.

Since a good number of households with married couples in their 20s have double incomes, these couples are choosing so-called pair loans, where both spouses shoulder the debt. A 50-year loan spreads out the payments more, rendering each monthly payment lower than if the couple took out a standard 35-year loan, so if a couple takes out the loan at 25, they would finish paying it off at 75. Though this makes the montly pressure less, it also reduces the couple’s ability to save for old age, especially since the longer the payment period, the higher the interest rate.

The day before the Sankei article, Asahi Shimbun went into more detail about what these young people will have to contend with by buying property so soon. The central point of the Asahi article is that the Bank of Japan, by raising its prime rate for the first time in 31 years last June, is also causing interest rates on housing loans to rise. The two megabanks, MUFG and Mitsui-Sumitomo, increased their variable interest rates for housing loans this month by about 0.25 percentage points. Asahi calculates that this rise in interest will increase monthly payments for a 35-year loan on ¥50 million by ¥20,000. Mizuho and other major banks have not announced any increase in interest rates, but probably will at some point.

Potential home buyers also have to take into consideration that the BOJ is likely to raise rates even more in the future. So right now MUFG and M-S are charging 3.375 percent interest for a standard loan, though the rate can go as low as 1.195 percent for “preferential loans,” meaning borrowers whose ability to repay the loans is easier to guarantee.

Eighty percent of borrowers choose variable interest rather than fixed interest because, initially, variable rates are lower; but, of course, they are subject to change every six months or so depending on economic circumstances, so they could easily go up.

According to a housing loan research organization, if someone borrows ¥50 million for 35 years at the variable rate, they will pay on average about ¥20,000 more in monthly payments after the BOJ increase than they did before the increase.

The organization also reports that almost all the people who choose a variable interest rate also choose to pay interest and principal at the same time and in the same monthly amounts, regardless of the current interest rate, but in doing so they tend to pay more interest in the long run. Those who choose to pay the interest first pay less interest in the long run. And those who pay both interest and principal at the same time with the interest changing based on the balance of the principal—meaning the monthly payment will not always be the same—will also pay off the interest more quickly.

Too close for comfort

Posted on 13 Days Ago by catforehead

*Data center under construction in Inzai*

The Japan Times ran a very good article last June that we found particularly interesting because it focused on the construction of data centers in the Chiba Prefecture city of Inzai, where we happen to live. According to the article, Inzai is called “the Ginza of data centers,” and we have seen firsthand how the city has become a magnet for not only data centers but large-scale logistics facilities. Though the article does a good job of explaining how all these data centers came to be built in Inzai without any input or much attention from residents, it doesn’t really get into what makes Inzai such a popular location for data centers.

We first heard the term “data center” almost 15 years ago when we started looking for a home in Inzai. More than one real estate agent told us that property values would always be stable in the city because so many companies were building data centers here. They were talking about data centers for specific companies, mainly banks and financial institutions (Japan Post has its own data center in Inzai), and when we asked why Inzai was such a good location for such facilities, we were invariably told that the area is, relatively speaking, geologically stable, meaning that earthquakes aren’t expected to be as severe as they might be in other areas of the Kanto Plain. Since then we’ve come to accept this bit of seemingly conventional wisdom with more than a grain of salt, but have also heard other reasons for the spread of data centers in Inzai, one being that the city is close to where the trans-Pacific optical cable from the U.S. enters Japan, an explanation that also may buckle under close scrutiny.

We have our own theory, which is that the real estate situation in Inzai is perfect for such development. As many people now know, the problem with data centers is that they use an inordinate amount of electricity and water, which is why it is difficult to build them in densely populated urban areas. Tokyo, being not only the Japanese capital but the center of all business activity in the country, will require a huge amount of data processing capability as AI tightens its grip on information technology in general, but providing that level of capacity close to the city is going to be difficult because of the paucity of available land. Like nuclear power stations, data centers work more efficiently the closer they are to the places that use them. In the case of nuclear power, the longer the power lines that connect the station to the user base, the more electricity is lost. Nevertheless, the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), had to build reactors in far-flung places like Niigata and Fukushima to provide the enormous amount of electricity necessary for the Tokyo metropolitan area because of the density of residential development in the area. According to a recent article in Tokyo Shimbun, if data centers are also located far from users, “communication delays” can affect the “precision of information processing,” so the closer the better.

Inzai is ideal in this regard because it is close to Tokyo. And the reason—we think—that so many data centers have been built here is because of the existence of Chiba New Town, the ambitious urban development project launched by the central government and Chiba Prefecture back in the 60s. As with all New Towns in Japan, the aim was to create self-contained regions of commercial and industrial activity linked to nearby residences, but for various reasons, Chiba’s never achieved the ambitions its boosters envisioned. Consequently, the enormous amount of land set aside for Chiba New Town by the government, land that was inherited by the semi-public corporation UR after the government housing authority was mostly privatized in the 90s, remained undeveloped for decades, losing value in the process and becoming a financial burden on deep-in-debt UR and, in turn, the government, which insisted that UR unload the land somehow.

Consequently, zoning in Chiba New Town has been in constant flux in order to allow more residential development on land that was previously reserved for commercial or industrial use (losing money in the process). Most of this land is near train stations on the Hokuso Railway. Data center developers jumped in and took advantage of this cheap sell-off by buying up private land presumably still zoned for commercial and industrial use and then building data centers on it, often within spitting distance of residences. People bought apartments next to vacant lots that would eventually contain data centers that would block their view, a point of contention that is at the heart of the Japan Times article. The backlash against data centers in Japan is not as acute as it is in the U.S., where data center construction is being met increasingly by resident opposition. In Japan, such development is naively accepted as being a boost to property values, as our experience with real estate agents more than ten years ago demonstrated, but from what we’ve heard prices of such apartments are already dropping once it’s learned that a data center is being built nearby. The Japan Times report showed that Japanese residents, or at least some in Inzai, are finally realizing that close proximity to such facilities may erode their quality of life.

Make mine maglev (6)

Posted on August 8 by catforehead

*Section of tunnel that goes through Shizuoka Prefecture*

After years of delays, the Shizuoka section of the ambitious Chuo Shinkansen project, better known in Japanese as the “linear motorcar” and in English as the maglev, which will be able to shuttle passengers from Tokyo to Nagoya in as little as 40 minutes, has finally been given the formal go-ahead by the prefecture, thus prompting JR Tokai, the company in charge of it, to declare that now the real work starts. Given that the project was initiated around the turn of the century and the excavation of the 256 kilometers of tunnels needed to complete the route from Shinagawa in Tokyo to Nagoya has been ongoing for more than ten years, JR Tokai’s declaration requires clarification; but, indeed, in the larger scheme of things the Shizuoka section of the tunnel, though a mere 8.9 km in length, is perhaps more central to the project than any other in that it is probably the most difficult to carry out technically.

According to a series on the maglev in the Asahi Shimbun that commenced July 23, experts have said that building the Shizuoka tunnel section may be the most difficult construction project in the history of Japanese civil engineering. Twenty-five kilometers of the tunnel needed for the maglev—almost 90 percent of the Shinagawa-Nagoya route is underground—runs below the Southern Alps, some of which towers 3,000 meters above sea level. The Shizuoka section is smack dab in the middle of this portion and will be located between 500 and 1,400 meters below the surface. The deepest tunnel in Japan ever excavated is the Oshimizu Tunnel on the Joetsu Shinkansen line, which opened in 1982 and is 1,300 meters deep. But while there is some experience to fall back on, the Shizuoka section still poses some formidable challenges.

Two tunnels have to be built: the primary tunnel that contains the tube for the train, and the “advance” tunnel that delivers the equipment and personnel to the underground site where the tunnel is being excavated. The dimensions of the primary tunnel are 13 meters in width and 8 meters in height. Eventually, the advance tunnels will be refitted later as evacuation and maintenance tunnels.

According to one expert interviewed by Asahi, the area of bedrock that the tunnel will pass through is located at a nexus between two tectonic plates, and the friction between these two plates means that one of them rises 3-4mm a year, a substantial shift in geological terms. The pressure on the tunnel tube will constantly be affected. As the tunnel is excavated, some of this pressure is alleviated, thus causing possible deformation of the tunnel over time.

JR Tokai says it will use controlled explosions to cut through the bedrock at sections of between 1 and 2.5 meters. These blasted sections are then connected and reinforced with concrete to form an arch using steel supports with thick bolts driven deep into the surrounding bedrock so as to distribute the pressure more evenly. The expert, however, points out that since the tunnel is being built through two faults and different consistencies of bedrock, challenges the construction of the Oshimizu Tunnel did not have to address, they don’t know how things will work out until they actually do it.

Straight outta Tokyo

Posted on July 10 by catforehead

As we’ve written here numerous times, the cost of a new condominium in Tokyo has risen beyond the reach of most middle class households and even quite a few upper middle class ones. According to a recent article in the weekly magazine Aera, the average price of a new condo in the 23 wards now stands at ¥136.13 million, meaning that the average price has lingered above ¥100 million for three years in a row.

Still, middle class families are trying and usually require a break to get a deal they can afford. Aera interviewed a man in his late 40s named Kazuya (not real) who moved into a condo in the Harumi Flag complex on the waterfront last September after purchasing the unit in 2023. If you’ve read this blog for the past five years you’ll know that Harumi Flag was the athletes village for the most recent Tokyo Olympics, and that units were initially sold at prices considered below market value. Consequently, the demand was high and a strict lottery was used, with some of the more popular units attracting as many as 150 applications. However, because of the one-year delay of the Olympics due to the pandemic and other factors, the people who managed to get selected to purchase units had to wait a few years before moving in. Kazuya, his wife, and two children previously lived in a 67-square meter “maisonette-style” condo in Ebisu. The Harumi Flag unit is 82 square meters and reportedly has a spectacular view. The purchase price was ¥94.9 million, for which they took out a 35-year variable interest loan and pay ¥250,000 a month, not including management and repair fees. Since the family’s total income varies between ¥10 million and ¥15 million a year, they can afford it…for now.

However, according to Aera’s research, a comparable unit in Harumi Flag is now going for ¥190 million, an increase in value of ¥100 million since the Kazuyas purchased theirs. As Kazuya told Aera, the increase in value “has no meaning for us, since we plan to live here permanently,” though the statement sounds somewhat disingenuous. When you live in a property that has doubled in value in less than three years, it has to have some meaning.

The last time the average price of a new condo in Tokyo’s 23 wards was less than ¥100 million was 2022, when it was ¥82 million. By the following year it had risen to ¥114 million, a 39 percent increase. In the 3 years since 2022 the rise has been 65 percent.

Real cat foreheads

Posted on June 1 by catforehead

*A kyosho jutaku in its typical urban setting*

The title of this blog refers to two old cliches about Japanese housing that address size. The first refers to a common rejoinder to casual inquiries about somebody buying a piece of land, wherein the buyer would answer that the purchased plot “is only as big as a cat’s forehead,” meaning it’s tiny, when, of course, it’s never that small. However, recent news reports about sales of properties in Tokyo may cause new landowners to revive the saying with some justification.

As we’ve reported here numerous times in the past few years, condominium prices in Tokyo have soared beyond the reach of most average families, and yet Tokyo continues to be the only prefecture in Japan whose population is growing. An article last week in the Asahi Shimbun featured a woman in her 40s who said she recently bought a new house in Nerima Ward right after she got married. Before buying the house, she and her new husband had searched for a new condo within Tokyo’s 23 wards for about six months, but almost all the ones they liked were being offered through auction sales that started above ¥100 million. Obviously, she thought, they should have started looking more tha 5 years ago. In addition to the high price and the mortgage interest they would have to pay hefty monthly management and repair fees, so she gave up on the condo and instead bought a new house through a lottery system, beating out three other contenders for a building that was 20 percent cheaper than what her budget had been for a condo.

The total floor area for the house is 85 square meters, which is quite small and one would assume, given the land use rates in Tokyo, the size of the land is probably not much more than 60 square meters. The location is 18 minutes by foot to the nearest train station, which the woman, who works in central Tokyo, says is tolerable. More significantly, she says the mortgage terms are “not difficult” and fit her financial situation.

Asahi is covering the woman because new houses have become much more popular in Tokyo in the past several years owing to the scarcity of affordable new condominiums. The Real Estate Information Network (REINS) for East Japan reports that the sale of new and used houses in the Tokyo metropolitan area has increased for three years in a row, probably because while prices of new houses have also increased during that period, they have increased at a slower rate than that for condos. The average price of a new house in the metro area in 2025 increased by 4.6 percent compared to 2024, while the price of new condos increased by a whopping 20.3 percent, boosted mainly by investors.

The appeal of houses over condos is probably obvious to most people, but size isn’t necessarily one of those appeals. The Real Estate Business Research Laboratory says that the average size of new condos in the Tokyo metro area has remained less than 70 square meters for the last decade, and continues to shrink. Developers have taken note. Sumitomo Real Estate’s City Garden brand allows buyers to design their own 100-square meter house in the Tokyo area, or about 30 square meters more than the average condo, and while prices are not much different than those for condos (¥80 to ¥150 million), sales have been good. Another builder/developer, Tokyo Tatemono, stopped building single-family homes some time ago but recently got back into the game and has a plan to build about 100 houses in the 23 wards in coming months.

The majority of these new houses are classified as kyosho jutaku, or “very small houses.” A number of architectural firms specialize in kyosho jutaku, which is defined as being designed for lots that are less than 60 square meters. The sales of such houses in Tokyo have increased over the past 5 years by 3.2 times. Because of special design needs, often these houses are more expensive per square meter than larger houses, but buyers know this and are splurging because often the only vacant lots they can find anywhere near the center of Tokyo are very small. The average price per tsubo (3.3 square meters) of land in Nerima Ward, for instance, is ¥1.76 million.

Affordability for dummies

Posted on April 4 by catforehead

It says something that the big economic buzz word in Trumpworld—affordability—has entered the Japanese lexicon as a katakana term, though it seems to be restricted to real estate in Tokyo, which, as we’ve mentioned so many times, is the only real estate story that the Japanese media cares about. But while everybody knows that prices of residential properites in the capital are skyrocketing, less is said about rents, which are going up even more.

In February, the real estate portal site At Home announced that the average rent in Tokyo’s 23 wards had increased for 21 months in a row, a new record. Moreover, the average rent for a unit for one person, meaning a condo or apartment of 30 square meters or less, had exceeded ¥110,000 a month for the first time. In fact, the exact amount, ¥110,177, marked a 12 percent increase from the previous year, another record. One of the reasons for this massive increase is the replacement of old wooden apartment buildings with concrete ones, with the new units being made smaller so that more of them can be fit into the space the former ones once filled. But larger apartments also saw startling year-to-year increases: two-person units (30-50 square meters) averaged ¥124,378 a month, a 10.7 percent increase; and family units (50 square meters and larger) averaged ¥174,082 a month, an 8.2 percent increase. Tokyo apartments outside the 23 wards went up less, but still went up: ¥87,887 for a two-person unit, an increase of 5.7 percent.

The Tokyo Metropolitan Government anticipated these developments and, according to Asahi Shimbun, will start providing “affordable housing” in the prefecture starting this year. One of the related measures will be to levy a special tax on residential properties that remain vacant, though so far no details or timeline has been announced.

What has been rushed into realization is ¥10 billion in investments from Tokyo in new affordable housing in partnerships with four foundations set up by major real estate companies like Nomura Fudosan. These funds will be used to operate rental housing that on average will be about 20 percent cheaper than current market rates. This year 350 units throughout the city will be made available starting next month. All these units are existing apartments that have been renovated. In principle, Tokyo is not going to build any new housing for the project but rather use existing structures with the help of private partners and investors, who will earn dividends on the returns, though lower than other real estate investments since such investments are pegged as “social contributions.” Tokyo is currently studying a system that could create more rental units by easing capacity rates in order to encourage developers to build more affordable housing. (Though it should be noted that easing capacity rates was the scheme of the Koizumi administration to increase construction, which lead to the boom in high-rise condos.)

One affordable rental property has already opened. Neuvono Kikukawa, operated by Mitsui Real Estate, as a kind of model for the project. It is two buildings in Sumida Ward comprising about 100 units, each about 55 square meters in size. The target is families and all the units were quickly rented out. There is a licensed nursery school on the first floor that is always open.

Lease on life

Posted on March 26 by catforehead

*An image of the residence described in the Asahi article located in the Koishikawa area of Tokyo*

Though home prices in Tokyo occasionally drop temporarily, in general they now remain pretty much out of reach for most sentient humans, which isn’t to say that most sentient humans don’t try to buy a home in Tokyo when it suits their needs. Regardless of the effect of foreigners buying up properties as investments, it’s why Tokyo will always be very expensive while the rest of the country is pretty affordable, if not downright cheap. And by expensive, I don’t necessarily mean the prices themselves, but rather the conditions of owning a home, which include strictly enforced mortgage payments, high property taxes, and other ancillary expenses that come with owning a property, in particular a condo, in the capital.

So anything that makes owning such a property more “affordable,” to use the buzz word that even local media have katakanized, will draw attention. According to a March 20 article in Asahi Shimbun, the big trend right now among developers is constructing condos on rented land, a scheme that’s quite old and used to be more traditional but which more or less fell out of favor due to certain legal realities. Now the market is so hot that such restrictions seem like mere inconveniences, and the response has been very positive, since not having to pay full price for the land can reduce the price of a comparable condo by as much as 10 percent. According to the Asahi, last year 1,502 condo units were newly built and made available for sale on rented land. Previously, the number of new condos built on rented land peaked in 2008 at 1,281 before dropping continually year after year, so 2025’s number is a new record.

Asahi uses as its prime example a new condo building consisting of 522 units located in the neighborhood of Koishikawa, 12 minutes by foot from Korakuen Station on the Marunouchi subway line. The area is considered exclusive and very desirable. The average price for a 70-square-meter 3LDK apartment is ¥160 million, which is still very high but, as mentioned earlier, about 10 percent cheaper than a similarly sized apartment in the same area. In addition, the first floor of the new building will have a supermarket, a public library, and other common amenities. So far, more than half the people who have expressed interest in buying are couples in their 30s who either have children now or plan to have children.

The catch, if you want to call it that, is that the rented land beneath the building will have a 70-year lease. When the lease expires, the building will be demolished and the land returned to its owner to do what it wants with it. The owners of the units pay land rental fees on top of their management and repair fees, and they also pay into a “demolition fund” that will go toward the destruction of the building when the lease expires. So while the prices of the units themselves are cheaper than comparable condos in the area, the fees are higher. Another incentive is that property taxes are lower, since owners only have to pay taxes on the structure, not the land.

Real estate people say that rental land for condos in central Tokyo benefits buyers, developers, and land owners alike. For the developers, the advantage is obvious: it is less difficult for them to obtain land, whose value continues to increase over time. The reason it’s easier is that many land owners tend to not want to sell while the price is always increasing, so by renting the land they retain its value over time, at least theoretically.

In the case of the new condo cited, the land is owned by a printing company called Kyodo Insatsu, which used to have a factory on the plot. Some years ago, the company redeveloped the land by removing the factory and using a portion of it to house their headquarter offices, and part of the condo plan is to rebuild a new headquarters as part of the development project. Apparently, this sort of scenario is ideal for developers, which are often looking for land to rent, though it’s easier outside of Tokyo than inside. In the past, shrines and temples, which own a lot of land throughout Japan, would rent out tracts of land to developers of condos, especially as the numbers of their traditional followers dwindled, meaning they had less income. Renting out land to developers made up for this income loss.

Hazard payments

Posted on February 1 by catforehead

On Jan. 15, two people were stabbed in front of a rental apartment in Tokyo’s Suginami Ward allegedly by the man who lived in the apartment. The two victims were part of a ten-person group who visited the apartment after a civil court decided to evict the man after the apartment’s owner requested the court to have him forcibly removed. The 41-year-old suspect, whose name is Hiroshi Yamamoto, had been unemployed for a considerable length of time after he quit working for an IT company. Though he started collecting government assistance, the payments were stopped when local officials learned he was working part time as a delivery person. He had lived in the apartment since the fall of 2022, and eventually fell behind on his ¥55,000/month rent to the tune of almost ¥1 million. In Japan, it is difficult to evict a tenant who doesn’t want to leave, so the landlord has to file a suit and claim a “justifiable reason” for the eviction. The court in this case found in the landlord’s favor.

The ten-person group that showed up at Yamamoto’s door on the morning of the 15th included court appointed officials and representatives of a moving company that would remove Yamamoto’s belongings after he had been served with the eviction notice by a court bailiff. Somehow, Yamamoto knew they were coming and met them with what the weekly magazine Shincho described as a “black cardboard box with smoke coming out of it.” He then chased the group while wielding a kitchen knife and stabbed two of the men, one being the bailiff and the other a representative of the rental guarator company that had a contract with the tenant. It was the representative who died. After the stabbing, Yamamoto returned to the apartment and tried to set it on fire.

According to the Shincho article, in principle, the bailiff and the representative of the moving company are the only people required to carry out a court-ordered eviction. The former serves the eviction notice while the latter needs to talk to the tenant to arrange for the removal of the tenant’s belongings in order to “return the property to its original state.” However, sometimes a representative of the guarantor company comes along “to make the process smoother.”

Nevertheless, as one man who has participated in such procedures for 20 years told Shincho, there’s usually “some kind of problem” when carrying out an eviction. He himself has been threatened by a tenant with a knife. “Sometimes they’re drug addicts and other times they’re people with big debts,” said the man. “They can become quite violent.” Usually, the landlord will send multiple notices to the tenant after non-payment of rent. If no payment is made after more than 3 months, the landlord will start a civil action requesting that the tenant be evicted. A judge will usually decide the case in 6 months to a year and if the decision is in the landlord’s favor another notice is then sent to the tenant telling them when the eviction will be carried out, so the tenant knows when the bailiff will show up. If the tenant does become violent, the bailiff can call the police.

Twice bitten

Posted on January 23 by catforehead

January 17 marked the 31st anniversary of the Hanshin Awaji Earthquake that killed more than 6,000 people and destroyed about 250,000 homes. Every year around this date, various media run stories about the quake and its survivors. Asahi Shimbun on Jan. 16 decided to cover a woman in her 60s from Nishinomiya who survived the quake with her family. However, her house didn’t make it. She and her husband hauled away the wreckage and then built another house on the land where it stood and which they own. Consequently, they were responsible for two mortgages, one for the house that was destroyed and hadn’t been paid off, and one for the new house. Thirty years later they are still paying off both.

Their story isn’t unusual, and isn’t limited to people who lived in the area affected by the Hanshin Awaji Earthquake. Many who lost homes in the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami of March 11, 2011, are also paying off two mortgages. It’s very likely that victims of the quake that hit the Noto Peninsula two years ago are going through something similar; or that they will go through something similar. Several hundred people are still living in temporary housing.

Asahi says the Nishinomiya woman and her husband bought their first home in 1985. Previously they were renting an apartment in the city, but when the woman became pregnant with her second child they decided they needed a bigger place and bought a used house for ¥18 million, taking out a 20-year mortgage to pay for it. Sometime later, the woman gave birth to a third child, their first daughter.

Following the quake in 1995, the authorities classified the house as being uninhabitable, and so the family had to move back into rental housing outside of Nishinomiya. At the time there was no public support system for people who had lost their homes in a disaster to rebuild. Instead, they relied on private charities that collected money from donors all over Japan. Each household affected by the Hanshin quake received about ¥400,000 from the fund. In 1995 only 3 percent of homeowners in Hyogo Prefecture had earthquake insurance. The woman in question did not, so ¥400,000 was all the money they could receive toward a new home.

Eventually, she and her husband built a new house on their land for ¥25 million, for which they took out a new 35-year loan. With ¥10 million still owed for their previous home, their debt was now ¥35 million.

The woman worked in a beauty salon, making an average of ¥80,000 a month, while her husband’s salary was about ¥200,000 a month. Each month’s loan payment was ¥100,000, so they were constantly struggling to make ends meet. To complicate matters further, the woman gave birth to her fourth child, a boy, in 2000.

All four children have now left home, but the loan is still there. The balance is more than ¥5 million, which means the couple still has at least 5 more years of payments. Making their situation even more precarious, the woman is now taking care of her elderly parents full-time, which means her husband will have to put off retirement until he’s 73 at the earliest, they calculate.

Fixed values

Posted on December 1 by catforehead

As anyone who regularly reads this blog knows, we have issues with the Japanese media’s coverage of real estate prices, since they almost exclusively cover Tokyo. For sure, Tokyo properties mean a lot in the scheme of things, but Tokyo real estate is exceptional in the sense that the city still charts growth while the rest of Japan doesn’t; or, at least, not at the exceptional rate that Tokyo does. Consequently, the huge increases in property values that Tokyo is now seeing don’t really represent Japan, something the media neglects to point out. What you get in the mainstream press when it comes to coverage of real estate is skyrocketing condo prices in Tokyo and akiya—vacant properties—everywhere else, and nothing much in between. So we were intrigued by a recent series in the Asahi Shimbun about how the government assesses property values, since they do it all over Japan. Though the articles don’t explain anything about national trends in property values, they imply that one of the reasons for the lopsided coverage mentioned above is that it’s difficult to trust any related statistics released by the government.

The series was prefaced by an article about an announcement from the municipal government of Chofu, Tokyo, that its assessments for property taxes and so-called city planning taxes were incorrect in 166 cases; specifically, for 88 properties the assessments overestimated their value while for 78 the assessments underestimated their value. The amount of refunds due for the overestimates comes to ¥80.95 million, while the additional imposition of taxes for the underestimated assessments add up to ¥52.61 million.

The mistakes mostly had to do with how land was categorized. For instance, property taxes for land categorized as residential can be reduced by five-sixths if it contains a structure of some kind. Other variables include additional structure, additions to the main structure, and demolition work, all of which would require that the land be reassessed. Apparently, Chofu has yet to determine exactly how they got it wrong, but in any case, according to the law if an assessment is found to be too low, the municipality can demand compensation no more than five years after the original assessment. But if an assessment is too big, then there is no time limit for compensating the property owner.

Obviously, land value assessment is a tricky business that’s open to a lot of subjective factors, so in its Keizai Plus section, Asahi followed up the Chofu item by looking into the broader “mystery” surrounding the land ministry’s public real estate assessments, which are carried out every year for 26,000 locations throughout the country. Two appraisers are assigned to each location, with each one making their own separate assessment, and if there are discrepancies, the ministry mediates. The “correct” valuations are then published on the ministry’s home page.

It sounds simple enough, but when Asahi checked the original valuations of the paired assessors using AI, they found that in 69 percent of the locations assessed, the two appraisals matched exactly, and in the remaining cases the difference was “within 1 percent.” The location with the highest assessment for residential land is Akasaka in Tokyo, and the assessors’ valuations have matched exactly for the last five years. The prefecture with the highest matching rate was Tokushima at 97 percent. Asahi’s initial reaction was that if the valuations are so predictable, then why do they cost so much? The ministry spends ¥4 billion a year on assessments.