House/land prices in Japan.

[Mahoneko]

In the UK we are just comming to a slow down in house price growth that has seen house prices rise by up to 500%. I just bought a 3 bedroom house for nearly a quarter of a million pounds. This means hosue prices in the UK are now similar to Japan.

In a recent survey of global house prices I noticed Japan is still going down. I would be interested to hear from anyone who is aware of the actual costs of buying houses/land in Japan - is it really going down? Or is the drop just caused by decreases in value of land in central Tokyo for example?

[senseiman]

The price of real estate seems to be goign down throughout the country, not just in a few urban centres but in the rural areas as well. The NHK news reported a few weeks ago the annual statistics for business properties in major cities, and they had all fallen since the previous year. Land prices in suburban and rural areas are also decreasing for a number of reasons. For one thing population growth has stagnated and the population will start decreasing in the next couple of years. Secondly people continue to leave rural areas in droves to get work in the cities, where high-rise apartments are being built like there is no tomorrow, further lowering the demand for land.

The price of actually building a house is still ridiculously high though. It costs about 3 times as much to build a house here as it does in North America, and the houses are much smaller and of much lower quality.

[Mahoneko]

Thanks for your previous answer, just what I was looking for.

Would you be able to give me an idea of how much a house would cost to build in relation to land?

In the UK houses are more expensive than the timber framed ones in the US, but I'm not sure how it would compare to Japan.

Is rural land decreasing very much cheaper than the cities, because we would rather live outside the main cities - we're thinking about Gifu (my wife is from Nagoya).