Month: February 2017

Pity the landlord

Posted on by catforehead

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These are the kinds of apartments subleasing companies build.

We’ve already talked about the sublease racket. The term has a special meaning in Japan that’s related to a specific real estate scheme designed to sell apartment buildings to people with extra money. Construction companies build small apartment buildings on unused land for the owners of that land and then manage the property for them through a sublease arrangement that requires them to pay a guaranteed “rent” every month. The logic is simple. The property owners have to pay higher taxes on land that is empty and so they build an apartment building for purposes of reducing those taxes and providing income. The construction company then does all the work of finding tenants and managing the property.

As we’ve mentioned in past posts about this scheme, it heavily favors the construction company, which gets out of its obligation for guaranteed payments to the landlord through various small print loopholes. The construction company, which usually has a real estate subsidiary, is only really interested in building, and understands that as Japan’s population declines it is going to be more and more difficult to find enough tenants to make even small apartment buildings profitable. Consequently, they make sure there is something in the management contract that allows them to get out of the deal if things go south, and invariably they do. Read More

Last resorts redux

Posted on by catforehead

file_6_18_1Several times on this blog we’ve written about the collapsed market for resort condominiums, which are conveniently called “rizoman” (for “resort mansions”) in Japanese. The majority of these apartments were built during the asset-inflated bubble period of the late 80s and the hangover from that period in the early 90s. Many, but not all, were attendant to the ski boom, and after the bubble burst and people’s interest in skiing deflated, more and more of these condos were abandoned by their owners, the result being thousands of empty units in vacation areas throughout Japan. More importantly, however, it also meant huge losses in property taxes for local governments and the deterioration of condo complexes that were no longer collecting management fees from absent owners, most of whom lived in major cities. These specific circumstances led to an unusual phenomenon. The units themselves dropped dramatically in price on the resale market and could be had for a song (or even a verse), but they could hardly be sold because even if the market price was only a million yen or cheaper, whoever bought them would also have to cover the back taxes owed, not to mention the unpaid management fees, and together these two debts could run into milions and millions of yen.

At the end of last month, Asahi Shimbun ran a series of articles about a turnaround in Yuzawa, Niigata Prefecture, which is the closest town to one of Japan’s most famous ski and hot spring resorts. (It’s also where the Fuji Rock Festival is held in July.) Yuzawa has been for years the poster child for the crippled rizoman market, a place that saw a huge amount of construction in the late 80s/early 90s and which later stood as a symbol of pointless extravagance. According to a realtor quoted in one article, there are some 15,000 empty condo units in Yuzawa, accounting for 20 percent of all the empty resort condos in Japan. During the bubble period, when these units were new, they were so popular they could be sold at auction, and many went for as much at ¥100 million. Now, many are going for less than ¥500,000, depending on the size. Management fees, however, are still high owing to the fact that many buildings have large communal baths, swimming pools, recreation rooms, and exercise facilities. Read More