[Assessed 98.1%] Apartment building in Suginami Ward, Tokyo — 4 min from Hamadayama Sta.

This is an apartment building in Takaidohigashi, Suginami Ward, Tokyo, a four-minute walk from Hamadayama Station on the Keio Inokashira Line. Shibuya is about 15 minutes away on the Inokashira Line, with transfers to the Odakyu and Keio lines at Shimokitazawa and Meidaimae. A shopping street and several supermarkets sit right by the station, so day-to-day errands are easy. The listing gives the town name only; the chome and lot number are withheld.

The asking price is 93,000,000 yen. The land is 152.66 square metres on the register and the building is 118.86 square metres, a two-storey light-gauge steel structure built in February 2005. It holds four 1K units of 25.69 to 33.74 square metres. All are tenanted, with expected annual income of 3,906,000 yen and a gross yield of 4.20 percent. The frontage is a 5.0-metre public road on the south side, with no private-road burden recorded. The zoning is Category 1 exclusively low-rise residential.

Our assessed value is 91,258,000 yen, which is 98.1 percent of the asking price: 90,069,400 yen of land and 1,188,600 yen of building. Almost all of it is land. The statutory life of light-gauge steel is 22 years, and by our method a building completed in February 2005 is 21 years old, leaving one year of remaining life. Once it reaches 22 years the building is valued at zero and the ratio falls to 96.8 percent.

A word on how we chose the roadside land value. Because the chome and lot number are not disclosed, we put the coordinates from the listing page through the Geospatial Information Authority reverse geocoder, confirmed Takaidohigashi 1-chome, and then narrowed the blocks to those within a four-minute walk of the station. The streets touching those blocks range from 590,000 to 740,000 yen per square metre, and we took 590,000 yen, which is both the lowest and the most common. At 510,000 yen, the lowest figure we found anywhere in Takaidohigashi, the ratio would still be 85.0 percent; at the neighbouring 610,000 yen it would be 101.4 percent. The seller's own sheet quotes 560,000 yen, so our measured figure is the higher of the two.

One more point for anyone thinking about rebuilding. Category 1 exclusively low-rise residential zoning with a 50 percent building coverage ratio and a 100 percent floor area ratio caps a 152.66 square metre site at 76.33 square metres of building area and 152.66 square metres of floor area. An absolute height limit, exterior wall setbacks and a north-side slope restriction apply on top of that. There is no guarantee that the current four units in two storeys (118.86 square metres of floor area) could be reproduced in a rebuild.

We opened the three photographs in the listing. The only step at the entrance is two tiles of about 30 centimetres; the road and the site are otherwise at the same level. The boundary structures are block walls and fences, all with level ground on both sides. Twenty-five readings from the Geospatial Information Authority's one-metre elevation data across a 40-metre square around the site all fall between 44.4 and 44.6 metres, so there is no retaining wall or step. It is neither a flag-shaped lot nor a terraced building.