Comment by franciscop
3 years ago
I never mentioned anything about prices though :)
550sqft (52sqm) for a single person is unheard of here. Look at the article I shared, unfortunately it cuts off at 30sqm, meaning ALL the houses of 30sqm or more make up 22% of the total. Assuming a normal distribution that peaks around 20sqm/person, you should've lived in the top 1-2% of Tokyo.
I feel like Paris' 20 Arrondissements is too small, comparable to Zone 1 of London and "Yamanote area" in Tokyo, while New York 5 boroughs is a lot bigger and more comparable with 23 Wards. But anyway let's go with it, since at least it's much better than comparing it with Tokyo Metropolitan. With Airbnb (which is usually a lot more expensive than long-term rental) I can find a bunch of places for under 1k USD:
For London I could literally not find any, and for Tokyo also a bunch of places (you might notice that these are way further from the center than the area of Paris, but hey I said that was fair):
So it seems that London is particularly expensive, similar to Tokyo's Yamanote; while Paris 20 Arrondissements are at a similar place as Tokyo 23 wards.
C'mon mate you can't be for real, you can't just look at Airbnb data and make any conclusions about rent from that. They literally target different audiences.
People living in Tokyo don't check AirBNB to find apartments to rent
Unfortunately, the sites they DO use are entirely in Japanese, so you're not going to be able to get usfeful infographic data in a few minutes
AirBNB is extremely unpopular in Japan, it's not a good comparison for anything. Searching on Suumo I can see over 100,000 apartments over 50m^2 listed (which doesn't prove much of anything, but gives an idea).
Run SUUMO or Homes through Google translate and you’ll probably get a good idea of the rent level
Yes, my 550sqft (was a very rough size approximation, 5 yrs ago from memory) was certainly not in Tokyo, and the 4万 (plus utilities) that I paid for rent was seen as expensive. I was just using it as a basis to show that straight space comparisons between japan residences and north american residences aren't reasonable, as everything is geared to smaller living.
I live in a 95sqm apartment in the city for 26万/m, and I'm in an expensive area. When I was looking for apartments, I found lots of 60+sqm apartments for <20万/m even in some of the pricer areas. For standalone houses, you can find plenty of 70+sqm houses for purchase at ~5000万, which would have a mortgage of around 15万 a month.
It's important to note that you can get a mortgage at a rate somewhere between 0.6-1.6%, which means that even for seemingly high prices, you can buy something and have a surprisingly low mortgage cost.