Regional Qualitative and Quantitative Aspects of Houses in Tokyo Metropolitan Region

Abstract

In Japan, the number of houses available exceeds the demand in all prefectures. Improving housing quality has gained importance over building new dwelling stock. The thrust of housing policies and programs in Japan is to improve housing quality. Housing quality is a very loosely defined term, and there is no consensus in the housing literature on its measurement. The present paper proposes the use of the hedonic approach to estimate a quantifiable measure of housing quality in the Tokyo Metropolitan Region (TMR). The objective of this paper is to compare housing quality in the five prefectures of the TMR and among six tenures of housing choice. The results indicate that the condition of rental housing in general is poor.