Abstract
It is often pointed out that imperfect information plagues the real estate market in Japan. The advertisement for sale of houses and condominiums does not necessarily convey essential information, such as detailed information about the residential environment around the house/condominium, its history of maintenance and restorations, its structural conditions that are hardly seen from outside, and so on. Only a careful on-site check reveals these characteristics. Moreover, most real-estate brokers are small-scale ones and they are not necessarily well-trained to meet buyers’ increasing demand for detailed and sophisticated information. They are locally-oriented and often attempt to monopolize local information rather than share it with other brokers in wider areas. Large developers have attempted to organize and consolidate these small-scale brokers to improve their trading practices, but progress so far is disappointing. In this paper, we concentrate our attention on the imperfect information in Japanese real estate existing housing market.
