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The story
The Real Estate Economic Institute has reported that the average price of newly built condominiums in Tokyo’s 23 wards has roughly doubled year-over-year to ¥265.2 million, setting a new record high. On 5ch, many commenters initially misread this as a month-over-month doubling and reacted with shock, but the figure is actually a year-over-year comparison. Posters debated what’s driving the surge, with some concluding that “only the rich can afford to buy anymore.”
On the 20th, the Real Estate Economic Institute announced that the average price of newly built condominiums in Tokyo’s 23 wards for July was ¥265.2 million — roughly double the same month a year earlier — setting a new record high.
In the six central wards (Chiyoda, Chuo, Minato, Shinjuku, Bunkyo, and Shibuya), the average price more than doubled to ¥436.99 million.
Source: yomiuri.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Japan is completely broken at this point.
This isn't crypto, come on.
The wealthy have clearly shifted their mindset — from the old deflation-era thinking of "prices will come back down eventually" to the inflation-era thinking of "buy now before it gets even more expensive."
As always, it's only the clueless average person who hasn't caught on yet.
It's funny — the smart rich are snapping up stocks and real estate to hedge against inflation, while ordinary people are still out here saying prices will go back to normal once taxes get cut.
dead last in the entire country, by a mile.
Well, that's also partly because of the insane number of students flooding into Tokyo.
That's part of it, but it's really the labor shortage and rising material costs.
It's a supply problem, so no amount of government policy is going to fix it.
At this rate even used condos are easily topping ¥100 million.
Who on earth can actually live here?
Even a "power couple" with a combined household income of ¥10 million would barely swing it with a 50-year joint mortgage.
A household income of ¥10 million in Tokyo doesn't even make you a "power couple" anymore.
You hit the landlord jackpot — an SSR-tier landlord who never raises the rent. (SSR: gacha-game slang for the rarest, best-possible pull)
My savings were already at zero.
Meanwhile people who've made money in stocks keep buying like normal, so it's only the absurdly expensive condos moving — which has completely broken the average.
In the end, the people who bought homes during — or better yet, before — the pandemic are today's real winners.
That's the current 30-somethings,
the generation that had it easy job-hunting thanks to Abenomics.
Gen Z, on the other hand, is looking at absolute hell.
but the sad part is that even a ¥100-million condo now comes with fittings equivalent to what you'd have gotten in an old ¥40-million condo.
Funny how condos from around the DPJ era (Democratic Party of Japan, in power 2009–2012), by contrast, tend to have better quality for the price.
Even a doctor or lawyer couldn't swing a ¥400 million house.
Probably nobody but foreigners or company owners.
Yutori generation (the more relaxed post-Ice-Age cohort): "Thanks to the Ice Age generation refusing to buy, stocks and real estate stayed dirt cheap — and we scooped them up and made a killing."
You can already see the crash coming in a few years.
Maybe I should switch careers into real estate too?
Anyone can become a sales agent for used condos, right?
Plus it's short-staffed and super profitable — sounds like a total blue ocean.
Takes guts — you'd be steering through the toughest market conditions since the bubble era.
It's over.
Even back in the early Heisei era, regular salarymen couldn't afford homes in central Tokyo either — that's exactly why they leveled hillsides out in rural Tama and built all those bedroom-town developments.
It was actually the "Lost 30 Years" that was the anomaly, when ordinary salarymen could buy homes within the 23 wards.
Background and Key Points
The Real Estate Economic Institute (不動産経済研究所) is the industry body that has tracked new-condo pricing in the Tokyo area since the 1970s, and its monthly 23-wards average is the benchmark Japanese media and banks use to gauge the capital’s housing market. ¥265.2 million works out to roughly $1.8 million at current exchange rates, for a *new-build* unit — not a mansion, just an ordinary condominium. The doubling to ¥436.99 million in the six central wards (Chiyoda, Chuo, Minato, Shinjuku, Bunkyo, Shibuya) reflects those wards’ concentration of luxury towers aimed at wealthy Japanese, corporate buyers, and foreign investment.
The thread’s real disagreement wasn’t over the headline number but over the cause: some blamed a genuine mindset shift among wealthy Japanese, moving from three decades of deflationary “prices will fall again” thinking to inflation-era “buy now,” while others pointed to a straightforward supply-side story — labor shortages and rising material costs squeezing all new construction, which no policy fix can reverse quickly. A side debate also broke out over Tokyo’s rock-bottom homeownership rate, which one poster attributed less to prices than to the sheer number of students and transients who never buy at all.
What the thread never engages with is that record-high luxury units skew a citywide “average” upward even if typical listings haven’t moved proportionally — and, as one late reply noted, ordinary salarymen affording central Tokyo homes was itself a historical anomaly of the deflationary “Lost 30 Years,” not the long-run norm.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch “Nandemo Jikkyo G” (general live-commentary) board thread “[Sad News] Average Price of New Condos in Tokyo’s 23 Wards Doubles “Month-over-Month” WWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW” (the W’s mimic laughter, like “lol”).
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