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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.

This study uses a unique data set on the “inquiry volume” that each property received from an online real estate portal to measure the volume of demand in relation to supply. Simple regressions are conducted in the resale condominium market across the Tokyo metropolitan area.

The inquiry volume successfully tracked a recent expected trend in which demand relative to supply is stronger for condominiums in reasonably priced areas, condominiums in convenient, accessible locations, condominiums built within the last 20 years and compact and spacious units. This study also confirms that these trends cannot be captured through heterogeneity in price levels, which has been widely used in previous studies on measuring housing preferences.

As an indicator of conditions in the housing market, the property-level inquiry volume has strong potential to provide useful information for supply strategies and for the sustainable use of existing housing stocks.

The originality of this paper is the use of information on the buyer side, which is typically unobservable.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between market share and rent levels to understand the supply structure in the Japanese private rental housing market.

The study calculates the municipal-level market share of a dominant rental housing operator in Japan and ascertained the overall market rent and the dominant operator’s rent premium at the municipal level by using a major web portal’s listing data of rental houses.

The study shows that, as market share increased, overall market rent tends to decrease, and analyzed by market share, there is no significant difference between the rent of the dominant operator and the overall market rent.

The results of the study suggest that dominant operators may have lowered the rent of their own property to prioritize filling vacancies, which, in turn, causes the overall level of market rent to decline. This is an outcome of rental housing operators’ strategy to maximize long-term rental income under sublease contracts with individual owners, which ensures stable rental income for owners regardless of the occupation status of the apartments.

Previous research on regional monopolies in mortgage sales and brokerage businesses in the USA implies that rental housing operators in a position of great influence over the market can control and keep the market rents at high levels, that is, at large costs for consumers. The findings of the study are novel in showing the inverse relationship in the Japanese private rental market.

This study aims to explore the spatial externalities of apartment vacancy rates on housing rent by considering multiple vacancy durations.

This research uses smart meter data to measure unobservable vacant houses. This study made a significant contribution by applying building-level smart meter data to housing market analysis. It examined whether vacancy duration significantly affected apartment rent and whether the relationship between apartment rent and vacancy rate differed depending on the level of housing rent.

The primary finding indicates that there is a significant negative correlation between apartment rent and vacancy duration. Considering the spatial externalities of apartment vacancy rates, the apartment vacancy rates of surrounding buildings did not show any statistical significance. Moreover, quantile regression results indicate that although the bottom 10% of apartment rent levels showed a negative correlation with all vacancy durations, the top 10% showed no statistical significance related to vacancies.

This study measures the extent of spatial externalities that can differentiate taxation based on housing vacancies.

The findings indicate that landlords have asymmetric information about their buildings compared with the surrounding buildings, and the extent to which price adjusts for long-term vacancies differs depending on the level of apartment rent.