Masatomo Suzuki

Hitotsubashi University · Center for the Promotion of Social Data Science Education and Research

In Japan, tenants are protected in the sense that owners must compensate them for evicting them against their will, while owners cannot foresee the intended tenure length of prospective tenants. If owners cannot specify the term of a lease, social inefficiency emerges: (i) detached houses owned by individual households remain vacant for a certain p...

With a simple model of land use and market arbitrage, this paper investigates the impact of population decline – when existing homeowners compete to attract a small number of new residents – on homeownership and land use. We show that, if a strictly positive cost is required for ownership abandonment, selling used houses is impossible in the periph...

Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) renew and recycle their property portfolios through divestment of inefficient assets and new acquisitions. Most previous literature focuses on the wealth effect of acquisition on REIT-level performance, while the property-level renewal process of REIT portfolios (especially divestments) remains unclear. Using a...

While houses in Asian countries have attracted international attention for the active new housing construction and rapid demolition of existing houses, empirical evidence on the structure depreciation curve is scarce. Employing a unique dataset of nationwide housing transaction prices collected by the Japanese government, which is decomposed into s...

This study investigates the economic premium of multiple housing certificates to promote the long-life property and existing housing transactions in Japan. These certificates are different from the widely investigated green or environmental-related certificates. Employing transaction data for detached houses in the Tokyo metropolitan area, hedonic...

This study attempts to predict and forecast the future heterogeneous increase in the vacant house ratio among prefectures in Japan using spatial panel models with unobserved dynamic spatiotemporal effects. The study formulated models with autoregressive and random-walk spatiotemporal effects, referring to the dynamic spatiotemporal effects (DSE) mo...

This paper documents the discrimination against the ‘atypical’ type of tenants in the Tokyo private rental housing market, using tenant-level records on the moving-in inspection process and future rent arrears, which go beyond previous experimental and audit studies on the availability of listing rental properties. We exhibit discrimination in that...

This paper investigates a possibility of mispricing and withdrawal from housing market among potentially disadvantageous properties. A comparison of price setting and property characteristics between listed properties on real estate portal and transacted properties is conducted in the suburb of the Tokyo metropolitan area. We find that old properti...

Employing ownership transfer registration data, this paper investigates changing trends in the transaction volume of existing houses during the COVID-19 pandemic. From 2019 to 2020 in the Tokyo metropolitan area, we show the following trends relative to prior years: (i) transaction volume decreases in areas 0-20km away from central Tokyo, and for d...

Employing parcel-level data on vacant houses in a depopulating city in the Tokyo metropolitan area, we provide the evidence of negative externalities of long-term vacant houses that persist for several years. Ownership of a vacant house continues, whereas the level of maintenance declines; thus, the Japanese context enables us to simply capture the...

Purpose Houses are durable, so an imbalance between demand and supply occurs after time has passed since initial construction. The purpose of this study is to quantify the extent of this imbalance for existing houses, focusing on the heterogeneity across property segments. Design/methodology/approach This study uses a unique data set on the “inqui...

Visual impression of urban landscape has been investigated in detail through behavioral experiments and questionnaire surveys in the field of architecture. However, in order to give an incentive to build and maintain a good residential environment, an economic consideration of the urban landscape across space is also an important aspect. Employing...

Employing a novel dataset on weekly “inquiry volume” indicator from the online real estate web portal, this paper investigates the intensity and direction of housing search during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Tokyo metropolitan area. We first show that housing search intensity temporarily increases following the emergency declara...

This paper documents housing rent rigidity under downward pressure, using the monthly household/room-level movement of housing rents through tenancies and vacancies in Tokyo during the period 2000Q1–2017Q2. The consistent overall rent rigidity exists because of the small extensive margin (limited adjustment opportunity) and small intensive margin (...

Compared to western countries, Japan still has a large number of new housing starts while vacant stocks have been increased over time. A possible explanation is that effective age of houses is short in housing market: existing housing stock becomes economically obsolete once new housing equipment emerge among newly built houses. Although reform and...

In resale detached housing market in Tokyo, this paper attempts to measure demand-supply balance in housing market using a novel dataset on “property-level inquiry volume” from the online real estate web portal. Through logistic regressions, we decompose the volume of inquiries into their property characteristics. We first show that the inquiry lev...

Although a substantial number of houses in shrinking societies face long-term vacancy and ownership abandonment, previous literature on housing market structures has independently modelled illiquid status due to temporary decline in demand, implicitly assuming that all potential sellers try to sell in the market. This paper proposes a unified frame...

This article reviews previous literature and existing data sources on housing purchase behavior of households. Their main interests have been twofold: （i） quantifying “household portfolio” including housing and （ii）understanding “preferences” on housing and residential environment. Through a comparison between Japan and Western countries, we discus...

Condominiums have been a major tenure status in metropolises, while recent population shrinkage sheds lights on its sustainability—whether they continue to attract new residents. Exploiting a detailed questionnaire survey for buyers of newly-built condominiums, we investigate the long-run trends of the preferred residential environment across the T...

Although metropolises continue to grow worldwide, they face the risk of shrinkage. This study seeks to capture and contextualize the “shrinkage” of the office market in Tokyo, a city that is one of the largest in the world but whose labor force has been shrinking since 1995. Employing unique property-level data on office building performance and us...

Vacant housing problems are prevalent in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area, even in a suburban city with high demand. In such areas, it is socially inefficient that houses that are potentially advantageous in terms of building/locational characteristics and could be utilized in the used housing market remains vacant for extended periods. On the other han...

This paper provides the empirical evidence of the demand-supply relationship in the resale housing market in the outskirts of the Tokyo metropolitan area. Focusing on the two established market-clearing factors-"price" and "time required to sell a property", we investigate how the potentially disadvantageous properties-in terms of building and loca...

Using a novel dataset of building/locational characteristics of vacant houses and questionnaire surveys on their owners, we provide an evidence on the long-term vacancy in urban areas in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area. Generally, vacant houses have disadvantageous building/locational characteristics than occupied ones, suggesting that used housing mar...

In detached housing area in the suburb of the metropolitan Tokyo, vacant and abandoned lots are increasing, which may undermine the residential environment. Converting vacant lots to garden or agricultural land use is said to be an effective way. This paper evaluates such residential and agricultural mixed land use externalities. Using hedonic appr...