Japanese homes only last an average of 30 years, and lose all of their value after 15. As a result, rather than being an investment that a family can build equity in, Japanese homewoners scrimp and save only to see what is often their life’s biggest investment lose 1/15th of its value each year. How did this come to be?
After WW2, the Japanese slapped together a lot of crudely built homes to house its population.
Those home were so shoddy that they didn’t have much resale value, years later, as it was actually cheaper to tear them down and rebuild them than to repair them. And that became kind of a “thing,” in Japan.
They would manufacture cheap, pre-fab homes that were not designed to last a long time, and building codes changed and improved, so it was more practical to just tear them down and rebuild them. And all of that became a part of modern Japanese culture.
People just view older homes as “crap,” no matter what their actual condition or appearance, so nobody really bothers to properly maintain them and fix them up for resale, because they know they’re not going to get that money back.
