Harumi Flag | Cat Foreheads & Rabbit Hutches

Straight outta Tokyo

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.

Harumi Pre-flag

Posted on August 24, 2022 by catforehead

While searching for any news about the current state of the Harumi Flag condo complex in Tokyo’s Chuo Ward, we came across an older related article with detailed information we weren’t aware of. As we’ve written here before, Harumi Flag was originally the athletes village for the 2020 Olympics, after which the apartments were renovated into condo units, many of which had already been sold. Because of the one-year delay for the Games, people who had put down deposits and made plans to move in had to put off those plans for at least an extra year, thus causing a lot of grumbling among the buyers.

According to a special report that appeared in July 2019 on the Min-IREN website, a consumer advocacy and social justice concern, people who already lived in the Harumi area of Chuo Ward on the waterfront had filed a lawsuit against the Tokyo prefectural government. The reporter was Nobuyuki Kitaoka, who often writes for the muckraking weekly Kinyobi, and he makes the point that the lawsuit had/has similarities to the 2017 scandal surrounding Moritomo Gakuen, the educational company that bought land in Osaka from the central government for a fraction of its assessed value, thus setting off speculation that this special deal was due to the fact that the wife of then prime minister Shinzo Abe was an honorary principal of the elementary school that Moritomo planned to build on the property. Apparently, the developers who would build the athletes village for the Olympics and then redevelop the complex into luxury condominiums also got the land at a fraction of its worth, and existing residents wanted to know why. According to Kitaoka, Moritomo paid only 20 percent of what the land it bought from the central government was worth, while the developers of Harumi Flag paid only 10 percent of the value to the Tokyo prefectural government, which owned it. Located only 3 kilometers from Ginza, the market value of the Harumi land was ¥959,000 per square meter, but Tokyo sold it to a consortium of 11 developers, including Mitsui Fudosan Residential, for only ¥97,000 per square meter. This consortium ended up paying a total of ¥12.96 billion for 133,900 square meters.