Housing Demand in Tokyo

Housing policy formulation should be informed by a careful understanding of the behaviour of the housing market, as reflected by housing demand. Such basic information is important, not only for improved project design but also for the development of better sector-wide policies. Housing is a complex outcome of cultural, economic and regulatory environment. Consistent estimates of price and income elasticity of housing demand are prerequisites for effective policy design. Results, from earlier studies on Japanese housing markets, are inconclusive and the estimates of price and income elasticity of housing demand vary over a wide range. It may be argued that measuring the volume of housing services as housing expenditure, as is done in previous research, essentially ignores the heterogeneity, and for large number of policy purposes like impact of tax on tenure choice, choice between owning and renting etc., the distribution of housing consumption into qualitatively different categories is of more interest than an aggregate qualitative measure of housing expenditure alone. This paper analyzes the demand for housing in Tokyo using a discrete choice model. Three dimensions of choice, tenure, dwelling size (as number of rooms) and structure type (as type of unit) determine demand for housing which are modeled simultaneously. The income elasticity of market share of ownership house is positive and ranges between 0.16 to 0.34. However, income elasticity for rental houses is negative ranging between -0.17 to -0.57. The own price elasticities vary over a large range from -0.03 to -5.1 with smaller in magnitude for ownership houses and larger for rental houses.