[zubiaur]

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).

[gabriel-uribe]

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.

[red-iron-pine]

yeah there is an expectation that you're either building a shrine type building (in that it's gonna be built to last and venerated) that will be there for 300 years, or else you're gonna replace it in <30.

that also leads to a lot of experimentation in architecture, since this building ain't gonna last so get weird. downside is it leads to a prefab corner cutting approach.

my brother lived in japan for a while and he loved it, both the long-standing rural places that were legit old school, but also when he was in the city and sublet some hypermodern, querky places on the cheap.

[jacobr1]

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.

[bobthepanda]

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.

[mitthrowaway2]

Seems like this should be a net cost adder. Yet even new builds are quite affordable.

[jjmarr]

Japan has stigma towards used houses.