Providing Quality Rental Housing to Help Corporations Attract Young Talents – the Strategies of Residential REITs in Japan

Abstract

Private rental housing has long been unattractive in Japan, receiving negligible attention from public policy and property investors. In the 2000s, the state launched a proactive urban renewal policy focused on the capital region to revitalize the post-bubble property market and attract capital through new financial channels, the real estate investment trusts (REITs). Since then, REITs have rapidly expanded in the residential sector, contributing to the provision of a substantial stock of quality rental condominium in Tokyo’ central areas. This presentation will highlight the key factors behind this unexpected success in the highly challenging context of urban shrinkage and population ageing. Based on interviews on residential REIT asset acquisition and management strategies, it shows that risk-averse criteria for tenant selection and investment return optimization have led asset managers to form alliances with large corporations to accommodate their young talents. While this supports corporations in attracting and retaining promising employees, it leads to a significant mismatch between mainstream demand in the private rental sector and the housing supply provided by REITs.

About the Speaker

Natacha Aveline-Dubach is a CNRS research director at UMR Géographie-cités (Paris-Aubervilliers) and a PhD supervisor at the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Proficient in Japanese and Chinese, she specializes in the urban political economy of East Asia, where she spent 13 years as a visiting scholar at various research institutions (in Tokyo, Kyoto, Hong Kong, Hangzhou, and Singapore). She is currently the Lead PI of the SPACE project (Shaping Public Adaptive Capacity for Environmental Infectious Diseases) in Singapore, funded by an intra-CREATE grant from the National Research Foundation (NRF).