Comment by shagmin
10 hours ago
Think I've heard anecdotes about Tokyo being pretty affordable as well. Quick search shows less than 1/3 of income typically spent on housing, which is much better than major US cities.
10 hours ago
Think I've heard anecdotes about Tokyo being pretty affordable as well. Quick search shows less than 1/3 of income typically spent on housing, which is much better than major US cities.
Yep. Counterintuitively, housing in Japan depreciates unlike most of the world
Wonder how it is like in other countries with shrinking populations. Say, Korea.
Intuitively, it would make sense for housing prices to decrease when the demand decreases, supply being equal (It's not like housing deteriorates significantly in the short term).
Not sure about Korea, but Japan's case is more interesting than simply adjusting for population: the government strongly incentivizes new buildings every few decades. There is also a culture of viewing housing as a consumable, which is the part that sticks out to me the most.
Japan is a bit of an outlier because of earthquake regulations.
There is a history of substantially updating building regulations every time a new record is set for largest earthquake in the modern era; and so if you are buying historical, you are buying a less safe property that could kill you.
The last major earthquake updates to the code were in 2000, so there isn’t a lot of historical housing stock without this confounding factor.
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Demand for the big cities is still increasing pretty much everywhere, even if some countries are seeing net decrease in demand on the whole. Also remember that supply deteriorates. The number of "ready to move into" homes can decrease over time without maintenance and rebuilds.
Japan has stigma towards used houses.
Housing built with pine 2x4s really _should_ depreciate especially in termite/earthquake regions like CA, but doesn't seem like that'll ever happen.
It does depreciate, usually. It's the land underneath that appreciates in value.
Occasionally if you get unusual spikes in building materials and labour costs then the house itself can appreciate in value because it costs more to replace it, but that's rare enough.