Tokyu acquires Kyu-Karuizawa Hotel
Tokyu Fudosan Holdings has acquired the Kyu-Karuizawa Hotel for an undisclosed price at the end of March. The seller was an offshore company.
Tokyu is expanding into the luxury hotel market in anticipation of growing demand from foreign tourists. They are also planning to open a hotel in Okinawa in a joint venture with NTT Group. The Hyatt Regency Seragaki Island Okinawa is scheduled to open in mid-2018.Read more
Yuzawa's resort condo market facing unique issues
Almost 20% of Japan’s resort apartments are located in the ski resort area of Yuzawa in Niigata Prefecture. The town has 58 resort apartment buildings containing approximately 15,000 units. Yuzawa also has the highest percentage of apartments as a share of total households nationwide, with 4 times as many apartments as registered households.
These resort apartments were built during Japan’s bubble economy in the late 1980s, with as many as a third of the resort apartments developed during that era located in Yuzawa. Buildings featured hotel-like facilities such as large hot spring baths, indoor pools, karaoke rooms and restaurants. Some buildings featured maisonette-type apartments over 100 sqm in size that were priced over 100 million Yen when new. However, many of the apartments were only designed to cater to short-term residents, with tiny kitchens with 1 cooktop.
From the 1990s onwards, apartment owners, saddled with high monthly building fees, effectively abandoned their apartments, causing many of the owners associations to face increasing debts from owners who had long-since stopped paying fees.Read more
Second building in Yokohama to be rebuilt due to faulty foundations
On April 30, apartment owners in a 262-unit residential complex in Yokohama voted in favor of redeveloping the five buildings after it was discovered that the foundations were not sunk deep enough. Back in 2013, residents noticed that one of the buildings was starting to lean after handrails between two buildings were out of alignment.
Residents of the 14-year old building faced a lengthy process, with the developer and construction company initially denying there was any fault with the building. Soil boring tests in 2014 confirmed that the foundation piles were too short and did not reach bedrock, causing one of the buildings to tilt. Reinforcing bars in the foundations of the other four buildings were also found to have been cut. Read more
2.2 Traditional machiya houses in Kyoto are demolished each day
Kyoto City is losing its traditional machiya townhouses at an alarming rate, with an average of 2.2 of these symbolic houses demolished each day.
On May 1, Kyoto City announced that approximately 5,600 machiya have been demolished over the past seven years. In 2016, a survey found that there were 40,146 surviving machiya in the city.
Of the surviving machiya, 14.5% are vacant and not occupied by owners or tenants, an increase of 4 points from the previous city survey in 2009. Kyoto City’s vacancy rate across all types of housing was 14% in a 2013 survey.Read more
Construction to start on Foretseine Motoazabu 2 Chome project in July
Mori Trust is developing a luxury apartment building atop the Motoazabu neighbourhood in central Tokyo. Takenaka Corporation, one of Japan’s top construction giants, will start construction on Foretseine Motoazabu 2 Chome in July 2017. Completion is due for the end of December 2018. The 5-storey building will have just 17 spaciously sized apartments.
This project will be part of Mori’s 'Foretseine' brand of high-end residences. Their most recent project was Foretseine Akasaka Hinokizaka near Tokyo Midtown. When sales began in late 2014, apartments were priced between 1.5 ~ 2.8 million Yen/sqm and all apartments had sold off-the-plan prior to completion. Re-sale listings in 2016 have had an average asking price of around 3 million Yen/sqm.
The land is approximately 1,100 sqm in size, while the building will have a total floor area of 3,500 sqm (37,660 sq ft).Read more