It's true that no one cares about Japan's low fertility rate, aging population, and urbanization that has long since ended.
In 24 years, Japan's ** and property market have been bumper.
At the beginning of the year, it broke 36,000 points, setting a new high in 34 years after the collapse of the Japanese economy; property marketIt also threw out last year's skyrocketing results.
From January to November 2023, the average price of newly built homes in Tokyo's 23 wards (the most central area of Tokyo) hit 46% higher than in the same period of '22, reaching 12 trillion yen (about 605 yuan.)070,000 yuan), a record high since 1990.
Now there is news on the Internet that many Chinese go to Japan to buy a house, and the Chinese carry boxes of cash, so that Japanese agents can point money to a headache.
It is said that in the second-hand housing market in Tokyo, the houses with good locations, good **, and high returns have been robbed "clean", and you have to queue up to buy a house.
Not only China, but also overseas conglomerates led by Blackstone last year went to Japan, and Hong Kong's large PAG Group also spent 51.4 billion yuan on Japanese real estate.
Today, Japan is like a huge magnet, attracting funds from all over the world.
This series, whether it is ** or the property market, can reflect two points:
1. Everyone is optimistic about the trend of Japan's economic recovery;
2. At this moment, no one cares how much actual housing demand there is in Japan, which has already aged deeply, Japan with a low fertility rate, and Japan where urbanization has long ended.
But two questions arise at the same time:
1. Is it meaningful for us to discuss the birth rate, aging population, and urbanization rate now?
2. How did Japan get out of the bull market after 30 years of losing under the typical three problems? Or what is the root cause of the real estate bull market?
Let's start with three data:
In 2022, Japan's total fertility rate is 126 is already the lowest value in the history of Japan. The internationally recognized warning line is 15, less than 15. may fall into the "low fertility trap";Obviously, and there is also a consensus, Japan has long fallen into a bunch of "traps".Japan's population over the age of 65 has reached 29%, and the aging rate has exceeded the global average.
With Japan's urbanization rate already exceeding 90%, it is clear that there is not much room left.
These "traps" mean that Japan's entire industry will shrink, and both consumption and investment will be affected, and the ultimate trend will be that economic growth will be affected.
So over the past 30 years, Japan's economy has almost stagnated, and GDP growth has been negative every year.
But what about these two years? These indicators, such as the birth rate and the aging population, have not improvedHow did Japan's economy turn around? How did the property market come back to life?
The problems of the economy are left to the economic experts to interpret, and we will only talk about the property market.
From the 90s to the present, the Japanese property market is actually three major stages:
1. The bubble burst, the property market diving stage: 1990-2012.
2. The bursting of the bubble was completed, housing prices returned to the early 80s, and the property market rose steadily and slightly: 2012-2021.
3. See new hope again, the property market surge stage: 2021 to the present.
What is of great reference significance to us is the third stage, that is, from 2021 to the present, so what is the situation of the property market at this stage?
The rise in housing prices is the result and the appearance, and behind it is the result of the joint action of policy, currency, supply and demand, which is also the three key points for predicting and analyzing the property market.
1. The monetary side and the policy side have been creating a favorable environment.
The macro environment, in fact, should start from earlier, from the first economics, that is, in 2012.
At that time, ** Shinzo returned to power and launched the "Three Arrows" plan, the first arrow pointed to the monetary system, in short, through the depreciation of the yen, the setting of negative interest rates, to achieve monetary expansion and the 2% inflation target.
Here you don't need to understand specifically, to the real estate partThe first is to maintain low mortgage interest rates for a long time, and the second is to increase residents' incomes through a relaxed investment environment and moderate inflation, so as to increase everyone's willingness to invest in buying houses.
The mortgage cost range mentioned before has been stable at 1%-3% for a long time, but now it is actually only 02%-0.6%。
At the same time, it will also cooperate with some policies to stimulate the demand for housing purchases, such as cash subsidies and extending the tenure of housing loans from 35 years to 50 years; Overseas investors are not limited to status, purchase and so on.
As can be seen in the chart above, the prosperity of Japan's real estate industry has picked up as a whole in the past 10 years, and it is ahead of the entire industry in Japan.
Recently, there has been news that Japan is considering withdrawing from the negative interest rate policy, which will affect the current upward trend of Japanese housing prices. But judging from the factors that currently affect housing prices in Japan**, it will not.
2. On the supply and demand side, the first in the Japanese property market has not kept up with demand.
Whether it is the policy side or the currency side, it is a parallel factor for the take-off of the Japanese property market.
The key factor is that the demand for the Japanese property market has risen, but the property market has not kept up.
Looking at the demand side first, the demand for the property market in Japan in this round is mainly from overseas investors.
According to CBRE statistics, the amount of real estate purchased by overseas investors in Japan in 2021 was 1With 1 trillion yen, it accounts for about 30% of the total transaction value, and is a major buyer of real estate in Japan.
After that, 2022 is 135 trillion yen, 294.5 billion yen in the first quarter of 2023, double the number in 2022.
Ansari, the founder of the global real estate technology company Juwai iqi, also said before that Japan has long ranked in the top 10 in the number of inquiries from Juwai iqi.
In other words, Japanese houses are very popular.
This trend is still continuing, because investors are profit-oriented, the yen has continued to depreciate in the past two years, and the exchange rate has fallen to a low point.
The demand is pouring in, and if the supply can keep up, there is no pressure on housing prices.
But on the contrary, in the past two years, the Japanese property market has not increased, but is still decreasing.
As you can see from the figure above, the number of new housing starts in Japan in recent decades shows that in the 80s, there were more than 1.6 million new housing units started in Japan, but in recent years it has halved.
This situation is even more pronounced in the Tokyo area (Tokyo + 3 prefectures).
According to the available statistics, the number of newly listed residential units in the Tokyo area will be about 2 in 202380,000 sets, with an average of more than 2,300 sets of new ** per month.
So in this case, how is it possible for a house in Japan not to increase in price?
Of course, there are many reasons for this round of Japanese housing prices, such as construction costs and land. I won't talk about the reason for the length of the article.
But for us, that's a good lesson.
Now many people are still saying that the trend of declining birthrate in our country has begun, the aging phenomenon is intensifying, and urbanization is coming to an end.
I admit all of the above, and there is nothing wrong with that.
But how did Japan get out of the mud? People have lost 30 years, and they can still see the dawn of the property market.
What about us? It's not worse than Japan, is it? Why is there no hope?
In fact, it is not that there is no hope, but that many people are too pessimistic, or blindly bearish.
It is true that the birth rate of our country has turned down, and the future demand must be reduced, but it is really too arbitrary to conclude that no one wants all the houses.
Everyone's requirements for the house, in addition to quantity, but also quality, as long as your house is good enough, scarce enough, you will never worry about no one buying.
It's just that it still needs to be boiled in the short term.
At this stage, the property market is sluggish, the market confidence is insufficient, and we are in a critical period of economic transformation, and it is normal to be pessimistic, but once we survive this period, the property market will usher in a recovery.