[Assessed 91.8%] Apartment building in Itabashi Ward, Tokyo — 13 min from Tokiwadai Sta.

A word about access first. The only road this property fronts is a private lane 2.00 metres wide, and 158.00 of the 254.00 square metres of land, more than 60 percent, is private-road burden. Whether that lane counts as a road under the Building Standards Act could not be determined from the listing. Rebuilding an apartment building is also subject to the frontage requirement in the Tokyo Metropolitan Building Safety Ordinance, which for a floor area of 500 square metres or less calls for at least four metres of frontage onto a road, so whether the building can be rebuilt needs confirming with the local authority and the agent. Nothing in the listing says the property cannot be rebuilt, but this is not something to judge without checking.

The property is an apartment building in Higashiyama-cho, Itabashi Ward, Tokyo, a 13-minute walk from Tokiwadai Station on the Tobu Tojo Line. It is a two-storey timber building completed in July 1986 with six 1R units of 11.00 square metres each, currently fully tenanted, with expected annual income of 2,440,000 yen and a gross yield of 5.30 percent. The asking price is 46,000,000 yen for 254.00 square metres of land on the register and 68.00 square metres of building. The land is held in freehold and the zoning is Category 1 mid-to-high-rise residential. There is no parking.

Our assessed value is 42,240,000 yen, which is 91.8 percent of the asking price. The timber building is 40 years old so it is valued at zero, and the whole assessment is land. We valued 96.00 square metres, the 254.00 square metres in the listing less the 158.00 square metres of private-road burden. Without that deduction the ratio would be an extreme 243 percent. When a figure like that appears we treat it as a sign of a constraint rather than a bargain, and a careful read of the remarks duly turned up the private-road burden. The remaining 96.00 square metres is consistent with the built form: against a 60 percent coverage limit of 57.6 square metres and a 200 percent floor area limit of 192 square metres, the building covers about 34 square metres with 68 square metres of floor area.

The listing we started from did not carry enough information. The frontage, the private-road burden and the zoning were all blank, and we filled them in from another listing of the same property. That other listing was registered on 29 June 2026, so the property has been on the market for about two months. Even though it appears as a new listing, it has been available since before that.

We checked two of the eight photographs in that other listing, the exterior and the private lane in front. The exterior shot shows the building's name plate and unit number plate, which let us match it to the property in the original listing. The frontage is a narrow lane about two metres wide, with the road surface and the site both flat. There is no retaining wall, no step up from the road, no approach stair and no embankment; the only boundary structures are the neighbour's low block wall and a white fence, neither retaining earth. It is not a flag-shaped lot; the narrow lane itself appears to be the private-road burden.

For the roadside land value we followed the streets touching block 18 on the 2026 map (sheet 47087). The west and south sides are 460,000 yen per square metre, the southeast 440,000 yen and the north 430,000 yen, and we took 440,000 yen, both the most common and the conservative choice. At the lowest, 430,000 yen, the ratio is 89.7 percent; at the highest, 460,000 yen, it is 96.0 percent, so the conclusion does not change.