[Assessed 83.8%] Apartment building in Kawagoe, Saitama — 15 min from Shingashi Sta.

The construction date is inconsistent within the listing. The structured field reads March 1986 (shown as 41 years old), while the notes field reads "Construction: Sakae-so March 1977, April 1980". Our policy where figures conflict is to take the older, so we adopted March 1977. A separate listing of the same property also gives March 1977 and an age of 50 years, which supports that. In any case, every candidate date is well beyond the statutory 22-year service life for wooden structures, so the building assessment is zero and the result does not change.

The listing's notes field carries a seller statement that "the building coverage ratio may be exceeded". In other words the buildings may be legally non-conforming. Zoning is Category II residential with 60% building coverage and 200% floor area ratio; the floor-area-to-land ratio of about 120% does satisfy the floor area ratio. On occupancy: Sakae-so is fully let (5 residential units and 1 retail unit), while Saint Heights has two vacancies (8 residential units and 2 retail or office units). Three of the 16 units are retail or office space, so the letting profile differs from a purely residential building.

The property is block 12, Sunashinden 1-chome, in block 12 on roadside price map sheet 26126. The coordinates in the listing HTML agree within about 30 m with the Geospatial Information Authority address API result for "Sunashinden 1-chome block 12". We then geocoded eight points, blocks 6 through 13 on the same sheet, and fitted a transform from latitude and longitude to sheet coordinates by least squares (maximum residual 16 m; we also confirmed the horizontal and vertical scales were near-isotropic). The predicted position of block 12 under that transform matched the measured position of the oval-enclosed 12 on the sheet within about 5 m.

Block 12 is bounded by only two roads, 140D to the north-east and 155D to the south-west, and no lower-valued road runs along the block's perimeter. The listing gives the frontage as "public road, south-west, 6.00 m", which by orientation alone would be the 155D side. But 155D is the value for a named arterial route, so to avoid being pulled up by the arterial we conservatively adopted the modal access-road value of 140,000 yen/sqm. The frontage road in the photographs is also a local street of about 6 m with no centre line. Taking 155,000 yen/sqm would give 92.8%, and even the prior-year 135,000 yen/sqm gives 80.8%. For the three-year series we retrieved 2024, 2025 and 2026 from the same sheet and matched the same roads: 130D to 135D to 140D on the north-east, and 145D to 150D to 155D on the south-west. The leasehold ratio symbol is D (60%).

We reviewed nine images in total — the three in the listing plus six from a separate listing of the same property (identical address, price and area). The south-west frontage and the site are at exactly the same level, with the retail shutter and glass-door sills about 10-15 cm above the paving (cross-checked against a 200 cm door height). On the north-west and south-east boundaries, both the ground and the building foundations of the neighbouring houses are at the same level. There is a concrete block wall at the north-east rear, but the air conditioning units and building foundations of the neighbouring house on both sides of it are at the same level, so we judged it a boundary wall that is not retaining earth. The passage between the two buildings is flat concrete throughout, with no step along its length. The steel external stair on the left serves the first-floor units and is not a stepped access from the road up to the site. There were no retaining walls or slope faces.

We used the listed land area of 407.18 sqm (registry, about 123 tsubo) as the effective residential area. The private road burden field is blank and no private road burden is stated. The photographs confirm a regular-shaped plot with wide frontage onto the road, so there is no flagpole strip. There was no mention of a sloped portion either. The Geospatial Information Authority's 5 m laser survey data also gives 13.8 m at the centre of the site and 13.1-13.8 m at eight compass points 40-50 m out, a gentle gradient with a 1.0 m difference even across about 100 m. That corroborates by measurement that there is no metre-class step.