The earthquake and tsunami that devastated Japan six months ago appears to have caused no more than a rumble in Tokyo's property market. Tragically, for so many communities, at least 135,000 homes were destroyed and whole neighbourhoods wiped out in the disaster that killed nearly 16,000.
Yet, even as the carnage mounted in the earthquake-ravaged coastal region of Tohoku, compounded by fears of radioactive contaminants in the nation's drinking water, in the major cities of Tokyo and Osaka, no major structural damage was reported.
Christian Mancini, managing director and CEO of Savills Japan, says the fact that Tokyo's real estate emerged largely unscathed from the strongest earthquake to hit the city since the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 was testament to the stringent seismic countermeasures required under Japan's Building Standard Law. In other words, lessons had been learned. A building code designed to make buildings safer in earthquakes, and implemented in the 1980s, appears to have saved lives in the densely populated cities.
'All new buildings constructed in Japan use state-of-the-art seismic resistance methods,' says Mancini, who is originally from Chicago and has been a Tokyo resident for 18 years. 'The very large contractors and some developers spend more money on R&D [research and development] to test out these new seismic countermeasures than most of their counterparts in the world.'
But the quake did shake business confidence, at least initially. The stock market plunged and, in an initial report weeks after the earthquake, Savills research shows that, in the commercial sector, some foreign companies had temporarily relocated their Japanese headquarters away from Tokyo to the Greater Osaka region.
Most soon returned, with Savills predicting that for some landlords the impact could be positive.