Can you explain why it is different?
Do the Japanese have some form of miraculous shrinking machine that makes a 50m2 appartment more usable to them when they walk through the door?
Please find me something that a comfortable home for the wife and kids in the city that is 3 times average wage years
Dave
All of the properties on the yahoo link i provided are in the dead center of tokyo.
as far as why it is not meaningful to compare a 50m2 apt in brisbane/sydney to a 50m2 apt in Tokyo, that requires a degree of cultural understanding. i know it is a waste of time to try to convince you that there might be something you don't know, but i will give it a shot anyway.
japanese homes are small. small homes are the standard. the standard is not 120m2 in the heart of tokyo. the standard is much smaller. i lived in hokkaido where a big apt was 75m2. i had visitors from tokyo who marvelled at how spacious our place was.
japanese homes tend to have very little in the way of furniture. rooms also tend to be multi purpose. people sleep on futons, which are folded up and put away in the morning, allowing the "bedroom" to be used like any other room. sliding doors create large open spaces easily.
appliances, furniture, etc. all tend to be much smaller and take up much less space. you dont have ensuites, you dont have media rooms, you dont have walk in closets. they are very small and that is the standard because you have 120 million people living on a piece of land the size of california, most of which is mountainous.
the greater tokyo area has about 12 million people in it, compared to what? 3 million in sydney?
that is why you dont get 200m2 4 bedroom single family dwellings as the standard residence in downtown tokyo. that is why you get 50m2 apartments that a family of four lives in without feeling particularly uncomfortable.
it is a different country, with different rules and different standards.
you are using websites targetting non-japanese. people who typically come over with a nice ex-pat package. my website targets japanese people. they are not high class luxury apts in the fashionable districts of town (i.e. your roppongi hills listing). they are the kinds of apartments that normal people live in. since we were talking about median prices, about the "average" family, my listings seem more representative. you can read it in english using the translation link. you can see that there are plenty of apartments available for under 3-4X annual income. of course you can--and have--go and dig out advertisements for extremely expensive places, and there are many extremely expensive places in tokyo. but there are also a lot of affordable ones.
you are trying to make comparisons with an area about which you have absolutely no understanding.
