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Originally Posted by Sakaki
I heard that new houses in Japan are not really built to last all that long and that when many people buy a house they actually are buying the property and tear down the house that is there and build a new one.
Is there any truth to that, and is it also kind of because that people do not want to live in a house where someone else has lived.
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I'd assume it is the same in the United States.... You buy a house, make any adjustments and "fixer-uppers" as necessary to increase the value of your home. Say that your house is thirty years old, there are bound to be dents and cracks, the flooring might be dirty etc... A propective seller would make necessary fixers so that the realtor could sell the house into escrow, right? And I don't understand the part where "actually buying the land." Aren't the land part of the housing prices in your country? Part of the reason housing is expensive in metropolitan areas such as Tokyo and New York is the scarcity of land.
In Japan, when people buy a house, there are several things they look at (in order of importance):
A. Condition of the house, price
B. Neighbors
C. School district
D. Accessibilty to shopping centres
E. Distance from the nearest train station
I'd take it is much the same in the United States...except for the train station, they probably look at the distance to the nearest freeway ramp. Isn't it odd to buy a house that you just looked at and tear that apart? Maybe some people do. Perhaps some people do that in the United States as well. But building up a home costs money...and I doubt anyone who is buying their first home is going to spend hundred of thousands of yen to tear a home apart and build it up once again.
There are tons of wooden old 50+ year old buildings in the shitamachi (old town) areas of Tokyo as well. The house itself is dilapidated and probably worth nil...they are occupied by elderly and families who have lived there since the pre-and-post war ages. Many of these are mom-and-pop stores where the first floor is some kind of store and the actual living quarters is in the back and second floors. But they are living on land that is probably worth 1,000,000 yen (USD$10,000) per square metre. Back in the real estate boom of the 1980s, evil real estate agencies tied with sokaiyas (yakuzas) would coerce people living in such homes to sell their property. However, the elderly people who owned these homes built them from scratch after the post-war era, and they refused to sell their property that they have felt attached to for all their years.
So much like the United States, where a lonely grandma who takes care of her cats living in a hut in the middle of nowhere is actually a multi-millionaire since she bought Intel stocks at 50 cents back in the 1960s, a peaceful elderly couple in Japan living in a dilapidated old wooden hut in Tokyo are actually multi-millionaires. There have been many instances where a person finds out he is the lone surviving relative of such an elderly couple who owned a house in Tokyo...the person inherits the land and becomes instantaneously rich...only to get taxed by the government for intestate.