Insulation blues

Posted on by catforehead

We use storage heaters in the winter, and they do a good job of keeping our two-story house uniformly warm, but the technology was partially based on the idea of off-peak electricity, meaning the ceramic bricks inside the storage units are heated in the middle of the night when electricity is cheaper and we’re asleep. Unfortunately, when our utility raised rates more than a year ago it also did away with off-peak discounts and last winter our electricity bills almost doubled. This year it’s been a bit better owing to government intervention, but anyone who lives in Japan, especially if they grew up in Europe or North America, understands how poorly Japanese homes retain heat. For one thing, central heating is not common in Japan, which means each room needs to have its own heat source, be it electric, gas, or kerosene. But the main reason for Japan’s cold houses is poor insulation due to lack of proper design standards that are mandatory in other countries. Even China and South Korea have strict insulation standards they adopted to address energy conservation needs and lower carbon emission targets.

Japan does have standards for insulation, and they were last upgraded in 1999. At the time, these standards were called “next generation energy conservation protocols,” but, in truth, they aren’t even mandatory, thus making Japan unique in that regard among G7 countries. They are simply guidelines, and while most builders adhere to them, the fact that the authorities don’t force them to indicates a curious lack of will that is difficult to explain, but a recent article in Shukan Playboy News made an attempt by comparing Japan’s insulation standards to those of Germany, which has the strictest in the world. 

An engineering professor tells the magazine that maintaining a certain temperature for 100 square meters of interior floor area in a house built to Japanese insulation standards requires seven times as much kerosene as maintaining the same temperature for the same floor area in a house built to German standards. And that’s using the 1999 standards, which only apply to 10 percent of all homes in Japan as of 2023. About 70 percent of Japanese homes were built using insulation standards implemented in 1980, which, of course, are less stringent than the ones implemented in 1999. Then there are still homes standing that have no insulation at all. 

That’s why Japanese houses are “naturally” cold, says the engineer, a situation that is actually illegal in many other countries. In the UK, for instance, a landlord is prohibited from renting out a residence if the uniform interior temperature falls below 18C. Also, in many countries landlords cover utilities, so it’s in their interest to maintain high energy efficiency. In Japan, it’s up to the tenant.

So why doesn’t Japan have stricter insulation standards? One reason is the commonly held prejudice that Japan is a hot country, so traditionally homes were built to maximize ventilation for hot, humid summers. Because of the draftiness of old Japanese homes, heating in the winter was done on a room-to-room basis. Nowadays, few Japanese live in traditionally styled houses, but the idea of cooling or heating individual rooms still holds, only now people use stand-alone heating units and wall-mounted air conditioners. 

Read More

Capital means

Posted on by catforehead

One more 2023 story about living in Tokyo, mainly from a Tokyo Shimbun article published on Dec. 14. Counter-intuitively (if you read some of the more recent posts on this blog), statistics show that the number of households with children is rapidly increasing in the city’s 23 wards, and that more than half of these households have annual incomes that exceed ¥10 million. More to the point, between 2017 and 2022, the number of households in the 23 wards where the breadwinner(s) is in their 30s increased by 20 percent, with median income being ¥9.86 million. The main reason for the increase is the improved daycare situation. Remember some years ago when the main story about living in Tokyo was the dire shortage of slots in daycare centers? With the rapid rise of double income households, daycare became a make-or-break consideration for living in the capital, because there weren’t enough services or the services that were available were inconvenient. That problm has all but been solved. According to a 5-year survey conducted by the interior ministry, since 2017 the household income of married couples with children has increased, with couples in their 30s showing the largest increase, and those living in the 23 wards saying their incomes have increased the most. The median income nationwide of households whose breadwinners are in their 30s is now ¥6.86 million, which represents a 13.2 percent increase from 2017 to 2022. However, the increase for the same demographic in the 23 wards was 23.4 percent. 

The main change over time is the predominance of double-income households with kids (as opposed to the derided demographic DINKS: double income with no kids). In the past, single-income households were the norm in the 23 wards, and it has been the availability of convenient daycare in central Tokyo that has attracted more double income households, which, as a block, has lifted the median income level in Tokyo. In 2017, 20 percent of all households nationwide that were waiting for a daycare opening were in Tokyo, accounting for 5,665 children. In 2022 the number of children in Tokyo on waiting lists had dropped to 32. According to one research company, income has increased on average for households with parents in their 30s at a much greater rate than for previous generations, owing to this combination of double incomes and available daycare. But at the same time the cost of living, especially in the 23 wards, has skyrocketed. Young persons with stable employment who desire to live in Tokyo and raise a family find that they are being priced out of their dream and alter their plans accordingly, with ¥10 million being the level that determines their choices. They think that anything less will make having a family in Tokyo impossible. Tokyo Shimbun’s conclusion is that, unless employers “give up their idea of how to compensate their labor” there is no way that the birth rate will ever be increased. This is probably a simplistic way of looking at the issue, but it sounds logical. 

Read More

Too much of not enough

Posted on by catforehead

One of the prime purposes of this blog is to explain the paradox of Japan’s housing situation. The country’s residential real estate market is one of the liveliest in the world, and yet most homeowners can’t count on their properties being net assets in the long run. And then there’s those 8.5 million empty residences, which, despite the occasional media story about some foreigner swooping in and turning a derelict kominka into a dream home, will likely remain empty forever without a concerted effort on the part of the central and local goverments to either find a way to make them desirable or get rid of them. 

A recent story that appeared on the financial magazine Toyo Keizai‘s web site reinforces this paradox. The writer, a real estate consultant named Yujin Oki, claims that there is a critical housing shortage in Japan. In a long article dense with statistics he doesn’t even mention the akiya (empty house) situation, probably because his focus is still on urban housing, and most abandoned homes are in the countryside or outlying suburbs (though there are also quite a few in Tokyo). The part of the paradox he does mention is the demographic angle: Japan’s population is declining, which means the available housing stock should be increasing, but it isn’t. He then endeavors to explain why. 

Since 2013, he writes, the price of condominiums in Japan has increased by 70 percent. The main reason is Abenomics, or, more precisely, the monetary easing policy that was a core component of the late Shinzo Abe’s master plan to bring the Japanese economy back to its former glory. The Bank of Japan would print more money and give it to commercial banks at low interest rates. Most of this cash was loaned out to buy land, since it is the most secure investment, and that drove prices up. This always happens with monetary easing. 

However, the situation was complicated by extraneous factors, namely the sudden increase in the price of construction materials and the more gradual decrease in the construction labor pool. Residential developers who borrowed all this available cash were faced with rising construction costs and delays in construction time due to lack of workers, thus driving the price of newly built homes higher. On top of the boost in land prices, new housing was more expensive, especially in places like Tokyo and its surrounding suburbs. Though he doesn’t specify exactly when, Oki says that the number of new condos in the Tokyo metropolitan area going on sale was once 90,000 a year, but this year the number has dropped to only 30,000. That’s why there is a shortage.

As we’ve often pointed out in this blog, almost all the writing about real estate trends focuses on Tokyo, and this article is no exception. Oki does make a point of saying that the shortage he’s talking about is in “places where people want to live,” but doesn’t interrogate that qualification any further. For instance, we can say for a fact that the suburb where we live, an hour from Nihonbashi by train, has seen a lot of new building in the last five years and many young families moving in, but this kind of growth seems to play no part in Oki’s calculations. New homes still seem to be affordable and plentiful for people with average incomes in our neck of the woods.

Read More

When in Tokyo

Posted on by catforehead

The most perplexing part of writing about housing in Japan is the mass media’s fixation on Tokyo. As we’ve said in this blog many times before, Tokyo is distinct from the rest of Japan when it comes to real estate, and while trends in the capital can often be extrapolated to cover Japan as a whole, many specific aspects don’t apply, the most obvious one being that people who own or are looking to buy property in Tokyo can expect at least some return on their investment, if not always an actual profit; whereas those who live in the rest of Japan, not counting certain regional urban centers, cannot. Even the akiya (vacant housing) probem is different in Tokyo. There are akiya there—quite a few, in fact—but they have not been completely abandoned, which is often the case in the suburbs and the countryside. Sometimes their owners are just waiting for the right opportunity to sell and sometimes there are financial obstacles involved, such as a failure to pay property taxes or inheritance issues. But the land will always be worth something, and that isn’t necessarily true elsewhere.

Consequently, the big real estate news in recent months has been the skyrocketing value of Tokyo real estate, in particular, that of new condominiums. The average price of a condominium in the 23 wards has now breached the ¥100 million mark, thanks mainly to the fact that brand new condos at the high end of the price spectrum sell out almost immediately. According to the land ministry, if the average price index were set at 100 in 2010 for condos throughout Tokyo prefecture, it would be 190.1 as of April of this year. In contrast, new house prices in Tokyo would only be 125.6 as of April 2023. The main accelerant is the rash of ultra-luxury apartments that have gone on sale in the central wards. The average price of a condo in the newly opened 65-story Azubadai Hills is ¥2 billion, with the top price reaching ¥20 billion. And they’ve all been sold. According to one real estate research company, in July, 1,542 newly built condos went on sale in the 23 wards. The average price was ¥134 million, and only 20 percent of them could be had for less than ¥70 million. Moreover, 93 percent of the units priced above ¥100 million have been sold, but that’s true of only 64 percent of the units priced between ¥80 and ¥100 million. 

Tokyo real estate values have always been supported by people of means, but it should be noted that the average income nationwide has not increased at all in the last 20 years. In fact, it’s now going down. The tax agency reported that the average income was ¥4.61 million in 2020. The following year it dropped to ¥4.43 million. This means the real estate gap in Tokyo is getting wider all the time, and pretty soon only very wealthy people will be able to live in the center of the city. 

This intelligence is certainly newsworthy, but the amount of obsessive detail that has gone into the story in the mass media has precluded what such economic shifts mean for the rest of us who don’t live in Tokyo and don’t make even the average income cited. There is very little. One example of this kind of reporting is a Yahoo! News special report posted Nov. 4 about the Tokyo condo boom and how hard it has been on two-income households that make less than ¥15 million a year. It is not a schadenfreude-fueled piece, but rather a serious study of how the condo boom has adversely affected the fortunes of those who get by at the lower end of the upper middle class. 

Read More

Stranded

Posted on by catforehead

Here is a link to our November column in the FCCJ’s Number 1 Shimbun, which is about how people without cars are finding it more and more difficult to access transportation options in Japan.

Price is right, for the moment

Posted on by catforehead

The news that land prices throughout Japan have risen 0.3 percent over last year’s prices was covered extensively by the media last month. Though 0.3 might sound negligible, it’s the first time in 30 years that the change was in the positive direction. Of course, land values in the three major metropolises have always gone up in a net fashion to a certain extent, but prices in what are called “regional areas,” meaning the countryside and smaller urban metropolises far from Tokyo, have either gone down or remained stagnant. The big news is that this increase has happened two years in a row, thus proving it isn’t just a fluke. According to the Asahi Shimbun, four regional capitals led the surge—Sapporo, Sendai, Hiroshima, and Fukuoka. During the pandemic these cities saw land price increases of between 4 and 6 percent, but last year the change was plus 8.1 percent. As it happens, rural land continued to lose value during the pandemic, but on average last year it leveled off: prices in 27 of 38 prefectures surveyed went down as a whole, but the prices in the capitals of 20 of these prefectures either increased or remained the same, further proof that land value may finally be turning the corner, so to speak. 

What this means, according to Asahi, is that people are moving into these regional cities in substantial numbers, thus boosting hiring and education, which in turn spurs redevelopment. So far the most publicized examples of this trend have been the introduction of semiconductor factories into areas where there was previoulsy little industrial development, namely Chitose in Hokkaido and Kikuyo in Kumamoto. In the former, the company Rapidus is building a factory that will open in 2027, employing about 1,000 people. Local realtors told Asahi that individuals and businesses are snatching up property near Chitose Station, the main train hub in the area, which is about 40 minutes from Sapporo. Some realtors claim that there is no more vacant land to be had around Chitose Station, and what is available slightly farther from the station is “very expensive.” By the same token, TSMC, the Taiwan semiconductor maker, plans a factory in Kikuyo, and the news has caused land prices in the area to skyrocket. One reason for the unusual increase is that a lot of people who own land in the area are not selling at the moment, but waiting for land values to increase even more before they put their properties on the market. 

Another reason for regional increases is that retired people are selling their homes and moving into apartments and condominiums in regional cities, thus boosting property values in those cities. One developer told Asahi that in Yamagata City a new 70-unit condominium still under construction is almost sold out and cites the availability of services in the area as the main appeal: a ten-minute walk to Yamagata Station, and within a 5-minute walk 3 hospitals, a full range of public schools and a retail district. Even with prices going up, a unit in the new condo is very affordable, 3LDK for only ¥35 million, including tax. One 88-year-old woman told Asahi that she moved to an apartment in the area after selling her house and since then her life “has become easier because I don’t have to shovel snow.” Asahi notes that land prices in Yamagata Prefecture are still dropping, but prices in Yamagata City have increased for 9 years in a row. 

Read More

Capital gains

Posted on by catforehead

As recently as a decade ago there was fairly active discussion in the Japanese government about moving certain central government functions out of Tokyo. The reasons were varied, but it mostly came down to their being too much power concentrated in the capital, be it administrative, economic, or cultural. Besides the most urgent issue of what this concentration means if a major disaster strikes Tokyo, there are the demographic considerations. As the city remains affordable to most workers and the center of government and commerce, the rest of the country is drained of manpower, resources, and capital, since young people still move to Tokyo and its suburbs in large numbers. On the most basic level, the job of moving millions of people twice a day to-and-from their jobs becomes an undertaking of enormous precision, and while Tokyo has managed to do it with miraculous agility, the cost to the country in terms of both money and individual well-being has never been properly gauged. As the pandemic recently proved, it seems most people would prefer working either at home or much closer to home. At the very least, twice daily 90-minute-plus-long commutes on crowded trains take their toll, and the main reason is that they have to work in Tokyo but prefer living in a place where they can own a home without risking their savings and raising a family in a comfortable environment. 

Nevertheless, the idea of moving government functions out of Tokyo as a means of encouraging decentralization has never received anything more than lip service. Some years ago a tourist-related government office was removed to Kanazawa or thereabouts, and there was talk about transferring culture-related bureaus to Kyoto, but Tokyo remains the overwhelming center of the Japanese universe. 

With this in mind, it’s interesting to observe how South Korea has addressed its own decentralization problem. Seoul is also a kind of black hole that sucks resources and people from other areas of the country, attracted by the concentration of corporate, administrative, and educational functions. But the government has actually tried to do something about it, and a recent interview in the Asahi Shimbun with the mayor of Sejong, which is located in the middle of the country, points up the differences in approach between Korea and Japan. In 2012, the central government of Korea designated Sejong, then just a patch of dirt about one hour south of Seoul, as an autonomous district and the future administrative capital of South Korea. Now, some 23 government entities have permanently moved their operations there, which is more than the number that remains in Seoul. In the end, the only ministries that will not move are those involved in foreign affairs and national security. They even plan to build a second presidential office and second parliament building in Sejong. 

The current mayor, Choi Min-ho of the People Power Party, who was elected last year, has been involved in the project since its beginning. Choi is an alumnus of Georgetown but, more significantly, studied local government administration at the University of Tokyo graduate school, thus giving him a unique insight into how the Japanese government’s approach to decentralization compares to Korea’s. As he notes during the interview, the main difference is “the speed of decision-making.” In South Korea, politicians have more power in this regard than do bureaucrats. The opposite is true in Japan, he says, where all matters are discussed thoroughly by civil servants and thus take a long time to reach any kind of realization. “And once a decision is made in Korea,” he says, “we take action.”

Of course, such a process has its own demerits in that decisions made in haste require ongoing repairs and improvements. He presents as an example the transfer of personnel along with the offices in which they work. “We had to think about housing them and their families, and if they already owned homes in Seoul, it might be difficult for them to sell them and move here. Some may decide not to move, preferring to commute, and then the problem is transportation.”

Though these problems were formidable, in time they became workable. A massive construction project to build collective housing was approved and carried out, and the government built a high-speed train between Seoul and Sejong that takes 50 minutes one-way. 

Read More

Not cool

Posted on by catforehead

According to news reports, the extreme heat we’ve had to put up with this summer is going to be a normal thing from now on. For a while it seemed as if Japan was going to be spared the worst of it, but that isn’t the case any more and forecasters are saying we’ll be sizzling until early October. The authorities warn people, especially the elderly, to use their air conditioners whenever necessary because heat stroke can creep up on you, even when you’re indoors and out of the sun. According to the land ministry, 89 percent of Japanese homes have air conditioners, but that portion drops along with income. Of households that earn less than ¥3 million a year, 84 percent have AC. 

There’s one demographic, however, that lacks AC almost altogether, and mainly for systematic reasons: people who live in public housing. An August 1 report in the Asahi Shimbun told of a 43-year-old woman who lives with her three children in a 3DK apartment run by the Tokyo Metropolitan Government for low income families. The rent and management fees for the apartment come to about ¥30,000 a month, which is half what the woman paid for a private rental apartment before she moved into the prefectural building 3 years ago. At the time, the apartment did not have an air conditioner, so she bought one for ¥70,000, including installation, at a discount appliance shop. Her apartment is situated on the corner of the 6th floor and gets a lot of sun, so nights can still be intolerable due to poor air circulation. The woman and her 13-year-old daughter share a six-mat room, leaving her two sons, one 19 years old, the other 17 years old, with a room each to themselves, but in the summer they all sleep in the same room because that’s the only one with AC, which isn’t strong enough to cool the whole apartment. Consequently, the sleeping arrangements in the summer are close and uncomfortable. During the day, they place electric fans strategically throughout the hallways to distribute the cool air, but it doesn’t work very well. The woman would like to buy a second AC, but there’s no place to put it. Her room is next to the veranda, so the fan unit can be placed there, but there are no other places in the apartment where a second AC could be installed. The building, which is 40 years old, was not designed with AC in mind. The electrical current in each apartment is set at 20 amperes, though it can be increased to 30, which still would not be enough. If the AC is on, she has to  be careful not to use too many other appliances, otherwise the circuit breaker will trip. And, of course, her electric bills are high. Public housing is notorious for having bad insulation, and her salary as a caregiver is only ¥220,000 a month. Besides, if and when she leaves the apartment, she is required to leave it as she found it, which means she will have to remove the AC and take it with her. 

There are 2.16 million public housing units in Japan, all run by local governments. The central government requires that all have kitchens, flush toilets, wash rooms, and bath rooms. AC is not required. The land ministry says that 60 percent of public housing units are more than 30 years old and 60 percent contain a head-of-household over 60. The Tokyo Metro government only provides 260,000 units (individual wards may run their own low-income public housing), 79,000 of which were built before 1970. None of the public housing in Tokyo comes with AC, though newer buildings have features that make it possible to install AC units. When Asahi contacted the relevant prefectural authorities, they said that older buildings are regularly renovated but not in terms of improving insulation or making it possible to install AC units. One staff member said, “We formulate design policies in terms of cost effectiveness.” 

A professor of environmental engineering told Asahi that all public housing in Japan is concrete-based and poorly insulated compared to wooden buildings. That means that temperatures don’t drop appreciably at night. Even if a unit in such a building has AC, it’s possible that the interiors will remain above 30 degrees. This is particularly worrisome for elderly tenants, who are more susceptible to heat stroke. Top floors are particularly dangerous since rooms sit right under the roof. According to medical statistics, about half the people who suffer from heat stroke and live on the first floor of a collective housing facility end up hospitalized while 90 percent of heat stroke patients from top floors are hospitalized. 

Another professor who studies low income households says that even when they have AC installed, elderly people in public housing often don’t use it because of the electricity costs. He cited statistics showing that most of the people hospitalized in Tokyo for heat stroke were old people who simply did not turn on their AC, especially this summer after electrical utilities nationwide raised prices considerably. He has demanded for years that local governments not only improve insulation in public housing, but that they install air conditioners in all apartments, because the problem of heat stroke among lower income people is only going to get worse from now on.

Resort resources

Posted on by catforehead

One of the resort condos in Yuzawa offering short-term stays

Last month, Gendai Business published an interesting article about the glut of empty resort condominiums throughout Japan and what some local communities and businesses are doing about them. This blog has addressed the “resort mansion” problem, which stemmed from a post-bubble construction boom of vacation properties. Many of these condos were built near popular ski resorts, since there was also a ski boom in the 80s and 90s that eventually went bust. Consequently, the owners of these condos stopped coming to ski and didn’t keep up their properties. Market values plummeted, sometimes, as Gendai points out, to as little as ¥100,000 for a standard 50-square meter unit. The reason for the cheap price was more than just low demand. Resort condos have higher monthly management and repair fees owing to extra facilities, like large, collective bathing facilities and ski lockers. Absentee owners were not paying these fees and anyone who bought the units were expected to pay them retroactively. There were also property taxes that local governments were keen to recoup.

Gendai’s take on the matter is optimistic, starting with the idea that, as inbound tourist traffic goes back to pre-COVID levels and the yen remains low vis-a-vis the dollar and other currencies, foreigners have become interested in these properties. The novel inference in the article is that most of the interested parties are rich Southeast Asians for whom snow is a fascinating draw. The reporter states that while “there are high mountains” in other Asian countries, “the snow doesn’t normally accummulate,” meaning that a sport like skiing isn’t feasible in these countries. Even China had to manufacture snow when it hosted the Winter Olympics. So if Asians do partake of skiing and they have money, Japan is a much more convenient destination, because ski resorts are eash to access from Tokyo or any other city with an international airport. 

The reporter may be stressing this point beyond its natural flexibility, but what he wants to show is why one ski resort town, Yuzawa in Niigata prefecture, is seeing a Renaissance in its property market. Yuzawa is an hour and 20 minutes by Shinkansen from Tokyo; 3 hours if you take a highway bus. And while some ski resorts in Japan have seen less snow in recent years, Yuzawa still has enough of the stuff to maintain its ski and snowboard cred. It may not be Niseko in Hokkaido, which is treasured by world ski freaks for its natural powder, but Niseko is also expensive and more remote and, besides, it seems to be overrun with Australians during the high ski season. So Yuzawa is accessible and affordable to a wider cross section of tourists. Moreover, it has hot springs, which are just the frosting on the cake for Asian travelers. And, in fact, as Gendai points out, this aspect at first made Yuzawa a problem for Asian tourists, since most Japanese tend to think of Yuzawa first as a hot spring destination rather than a ski resort, which didn’t really show up until the late 80s, so there are still some inns in the region that don’t welcome non-Japanese speaking guests. 

But Yuzawa has plenty of resort condos, and local real estate companies, not to mention the local government, are keen to introduce them to foreign buyers. Last February, another business publication, Toyo Keizai, ran an article focusing on the condo market in Yuzawa. Since the end of COVID, prices have almost doubled, which may not necessarily say much since, as Gendai pointed out, some units were going for as little as ¥100,000. But Toyo Keizai claims that the average price for a resort condo in Yuzawa now is more than ¥2 million. 

Read More

Dead reckonings

Posted on by catforehead

Typical wooden apartment building

An article in the July 1 Asahi Shimbun reported on a police investigation of a staff member of Tokyo’s Edogawa Ward’s public welfare department who was suspected of “abandoning a dead body.” Usually, when police make such an accusation, it’s a preliminary stop toward a charge of murder, but this case is very different. 

According to the article, a 65-year-old man died in his Edogawa home in January. A caregiver who regularly visited the man discovered the body on January 10 and called a physician at the clinic that dispatched the caregiver. The doctor went to the residence and confimed that the man was dead and, following official procedures, reported the death to the relevant case worker in the ward’s welfare department, since the deceased had been receiving public assistance. 

But while the case worker later acknowledged that he had received the doctor’s report, apparently he did nothing. On March 27, an agent of a rental supply organization visited the deceased’s home to pick up some equipment that had been lent to the man through the welfare program and found that the body was still there two-and-a-half months after being reported. In trying to explain this lapse in procedure, the case worker said they had been overwhelmed with work and had simply kept putting off the matter of the dead body. It should be noted, however, that this worker wasn’t the only person aware that the man had died. After receiving the doctor’s report, the case worker immediately informed their superior about the death so that the ward would stop its public assistance to the man. Following an investigation, the police said they sent their file to prosecutors, but apparently the case worker wasn’t charged. When contacted by the Asahi, the head of the ward’s welfare department said they purposely did not publicize the incident and would have nothing to say until a news conference scheduled for July 3, which is today. 

According to subsequent media reports the deceased had been renting, which makes the story even more bizarre: When they didn’t receive a monthly payment, why didn’t the landlord check on the tenant?

In any case, the story will likely only reinforce an unfortunate trend that has been on the rise for several decades and which was described in a June 16 post on the Daily Spa!. Landlords have become increasingly averse to renting to people “over 60” because they are afraid that elderly tenants will die on the premises, thus causing them considerable expense in preparing the residence to be reoccupied.

The main thrust of the article is that more and more seniors are having difficulties finding rental properties that will accept them. Many real estate agents for rental properties don’t even allow elderly people through the front door because it’s too much trouble. Spa! says that the general image in Japan is that the elderly are all homeowners, but, in fact, according to a government white paper, one-in-three people living in single-person households who are over 65 do not own the homes they live in. And this portion is increasing. As one agent who specializes in helping senior renters find dwellings told the magazine, most conventional realtors won’t even talk to elderly renters “no matter how much money they have.” The agent said that according to his company’s in-house survey one out of four elderly people say they’ve been rejected for rental housing as least once, and of these 13 percent said they’ve been rejected more than 5 times. 

Read More