Aging and real estate prices: evidence from Japanese and US regional data

Purpose - – Aging in Japan is advancing faster than in other major developed nations, and this is expected to have substantial effects on the country’s economic systems, including its social security system. What kind of effect will the falling birth rate, aging society and declining population have on the real estate market? Will the often mentioned real estate price asset meltdown really occur? The purpose of this paper is to address these questions by investigating how much demographic factors affected real estate prices in Japan and the USA. Design/methodology/approach - – The authors use regional panel data for Japan and the USA real estate prices and estimate the effects of demographic factors, such as dependency ratio, i.e. the ratio of population aged 65+ to population aged 20-64. For Japan, as no region-by-region quality-adjusted housing price indexes covering the entire country exist, data are constructed by conducting quality adjustment using hedonic regression. Findings - – Both in Japan and the USA, real estate prices in a region are inversely correlated with the old age dependency ratio in that region, and positively correlated with the total number of population in that region. The demographic factor had a greater impact on real estate prices in Japan than in the USA. For Japan, it was also found that demographic impact on land prices will be −2.4 per cent per year in 2012-2040, while it was −3.7 per cent per year in 1976-2010, suggesting that aging will continue to have downward pressure on land prices over the next 30 years, although the demographic impact will be slightly smaller than it was in 1976-2010, as the old age dependency ratio will not increase as much as it did before. Originality/value - – Japan’s regional panel data are newly constructed based on a hedonic approach. Analyzing the effect of dependency ratio for Japan and the USA panel data is a new challenge. Forecasting future impact of demographic factor on Japan’s land prices based on the population forecast is a new challenge.