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Comment by forgotmyoldname | Hacker News Reader

One wonderful thing about Japan is that houses are as much of an investment as toothbrushes. The minute someone uses it, its value drops immensely.

10 years is old but still somewhat livable and generally cheap. Once you get past 20 years, locals basically see the house as scrap. It's really easy to buy cheap houses or apartments over 20 years old. Some clueless foreigners new to Japan see these prices and think they can flip them and resell to get rich, and they're always disappointed to find out it doesn't work that way.

40-50 year old houses can be bought for around car prices if you're willing to live 30 minutes from a smallish city. You're basically just paying for the land at that point.

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Sounds like a monumentally wasteful practice from environmental standpoint. Are these disposable houses made from wood, or brick/concrete?

It's necessary given that regular earthquakes cause unseen damage to houses.

That doesn't quite make sense. You're basically paying for the land in many European cities, too, so how is the price of the building an important factor? It's the land that's very expensive.

Random land outside of the middle of urban centers isn't that valuable, especially when population isn't growing. What is someone going to do, hold onto it for decades and hope someone buys it from them at a 10x markup and be enough to offset the taxes they paid?

In some places (or at least the US), old houses generally gain value. Of course, land is valuable in and of itself, but there's no shame in buying a 100 year old house in the US. There's no worry of earthquake damage, generally no risk of extensive mold due to a drier climate than East Asia, nobody really worries about ghosts infesting the home, etc. Plus, 100 year old American houses are quite honestly probably better than the cardboard and paper mache houses that have been common recently. In my experience, 1920s apartments were much nicer than the post 1970s places I lived in.

Depends where i guess. In the capitals? sure. outside? not so much. my brother bought land, 70k in our hometown. the house will be 350k.

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