A Chinese investor paid the highest price for two newly built Tokyo houses in more than a decade as residential property values in the Japanese capital accelerate.
The unidentified investor in August bought two adjacent houses in Akasaka, a high-end commercial district, for about ¥690 million (US$5.7 million) and ¥680 million, said Mitsuo Hashimoto, the president of Housing Japan K.K which developed and sold them.
That is the most expensive a new house has been in Tokyo since at least 2004, according to data from the Tokyo-based Real Estate Economic Institute Co.
With wealthy Chinese snapping up luxury homes from Sydney to Vancouver, real-estate agencies have also been bringing property buyers to Japan as the yen has declined against the yuan.
“If you compare Japan to the world’s other major capitals, ownership of property by foreigners in Tokyo is tiny,” said Hashimoto in an interview on Tuesday.
The recent downturn in China’s stocks is prompting wealthy investors to put money into less volatile property assets, he said.
Prices in Tokyo pale in comparison to places such as Hong Kong and Sydney. In a Hong Kong building designed by Frank Gehry, a 483m2 apartment sold for HK$497 million (US$64 million) in June, setting a record for Asia, according to the South China Morning Post.
Residential property prices in Tokyo’s 23 wards gained 2.1 percent in the year to July 1, accelerating from a gain of 1.9 percent a year earlier, according to a Land Ministry report last month.
Land prices for homes in Tokyo are still less than 60 percent what they were during Japan’s property bubble in the late 1980s.
There are very few Western-style luxury houses in Tokyo for sale at ¥500 million or more, Hashimoto said.
Unlike in many Asian nations, owners in Japan can also gain title to the land that accounts for about 70 percent of the value, he said.
About 30 people came to see the properties with the final buyer among three bidders.
“The number of wealthy Chinese is increasing and Japan is near so we’ll probably see more purchases,” said Masahiro Mochizuki, a Tokyo-based real estate analyst at Credit Suisse Group AG.
Overseas buyers currently purchase only about 5 percent of new homes in Tokyo’s central wards and that is predominantly apartments, he said.
Visitors from China to Japan more than doubled to 3.35 million in the first eight months of this year from the same period a year earlier, making them the single largest group, according to data from the Japan Tourism Agency.
An additional 2.47 million visitors came from Taiwan and 991,800 from Hong Kong.
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