Value of Forest Land Zone lots

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starting_the_dream
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Re: Value of Forest Land Zone lots

Post by starting_the_dream »

From my understanding (and I welcome any corrections or additional info) any land used for agriculture has a classificiation. Rice fields are the biggest, but the next category is 畑. This is further broken up into pasture, orchards, fields (vegetables, etc), tree farming and maybe more. All of this is can be off limits to non-farmers as well.

Our fields were 畑 near our house. They had to be reclassified out of agriculture use for us to purchase them.

One thing to note about your question is that I have never heard of a rice field being changed to a vegetable field. I imagine some people would visit you very quickly if you started trying to convert one without properly discussing it with the local community at least.

edit: I stand corrected. It is possible to convert a rice field into a vegetable field.

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Zasso Nouka
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Re: Value of Forest Land Zone lots

Post by Zasso Nouka »

I've seen vegetable fields that obviously used to be tanbo, they are surrounded by rice paddies, but not sure of the procedure, if any, to convert them.

I also know of a farmer that makes her living from the rent paid by K's Denki, they built one of their stores on top of her vegetable fields. How they managed to get permission to build on top of farm land I do not know but I suspect if you have enough money or offer enough sweeteners then anything is possible.

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Re: Value of Forest Land Zone lots

Post by LeeB »

I remember reading about some farmers IIRC in Kyushu that were trying to build a 'solar farm' on their land and had to undertake some project growing stuff under the panels in order to get approval. It was some kind of crop that would tolerate the shade.

I think that the growing project failed for some weather or disease related problem and I don't know what finally happened in the end or if it is still ongoing.

I was quite surprised to see the all the 'solar farms' in and around Narita and wondered how they managed to get approval. Maybe it was all classified sanrin and there wasn't any problem.

".....whilst others will just plain refuse and give the impression they'd rather see the community die off."

Well that is going to happen to a large number of small villages and towns in Japan over the next 20 or 30 years and that is going to affect the value of all that vacant, unused farmland. Not used, not being able to be used, and untended will make it worthless. A huge economic loss to the country in terms of not being used and of course loss of tax as well.

As I have commented on another topic, I see a few apartment buildings coming up for sale here and there in the smaller town and cities and even a hotel or two. As population falls these are going to also become worthless and uneconomic.

(I understand that in Japan one can refuse the inheritance of property left to them in a will (Correct me if I am wrong!!!) and as such the owners continue to be those last on the 'books' even if they are dead.)

Most affected by the population loss will be Hokkaido and then the other prefectures where population loss is already ongoing. Japan is going to radically change over that time period and in effect become a country with even more population concentration in the big cities and an 'empty' country in the rest of it.

So if one is actually going to go down the road and buy some kind of RE in Japan in country or rural areas then care is really needed as more than likely the value over time is going to fall or in the worst case become worthless as there will be be no buyers.

Purchase of land or RE near an important middle sized city or bedroom town that has an increasing population and good transport to the bigger cities would be a starting point.

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gonbechan
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Re: Value of Forest Land Zone lots

Post by gonbechan »

Another thing one can do when looking for sanrin to build on is to approach the construction company that you plan to use and ask them to find suitable land for you.

I know people who have done this.

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Re: Value of Forest Land Zone lots

Post by Ibaraki llama »

LeeB wrote:
Mon Mar 04, 2019 6:37 am

Also was there much difference as the koteishisanzei that you have to pay is also based on that 'value' in the koteishisan kazeidaichou rather then the purchase price or does you city adjust the values to reflect the purchase price?

I've heard various stories about how RE tax is assessed and the various 'values' used..............
Old question but noticed it going through this thread - in our case the tax was paid on the "value" of the land, which was 12,000,000 or so, not our purchase price of 3,000,000. That caught us by surprise.

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Re: Value of Forest Land Zone lots

Post by gonbechan »

Yeah it is based on 'book value'.
You can ask for a reassessment apparently but I am not sure how you would go about it.

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Re: Value of Forest Land Zone lots

Post by LeeB »

"- in our case the tax was paid on the "value" of the land, which was 12,000,000 or so, not our purchase price of 3,000,000. That caught us by surprise."

Yes, I've often heard that the RE tax is based on some 'strange' value. And it is interesting to see that in actual practice that the 'rumor' is true.

So that is another reason to be careful when buying certain types of property especially those condos/units that were built at the height of the property boom and were valued at ridiculous prices. The person that bought one would most likely be paying tax on a value of multiples times what they paid for it (as in your case even with land).

Imagine buying a condo for 10 million and being taxed for a value of 50 or 60 million!!

I also think that you'd have a hard time trying to get a downward revaluation done on RE as the process would then start a flood of applications to revalue and the jurisdiction would end up losing a big chunk of its revenue.

(Here in Australia property prices have fallen in many areas and revaluations are supposedly done every couple of years. You can challenge the valuation, but again, I don't know if many people have had any luck with that. I wonder how much our place will have changed in value? We'll find out in a couple of months.)

And when you hear about falling prices here, you have to remember that they use prices of places that were sold and most often those are not 'price pairs' as used in the USA (Case-Schiller use price pairs.), but medians. Price pairs are using the change in value of the same house being sold over a period of time. Here they just use medians or in the case of the government stats, a made up number adjusted for various factors such as land size, number of bedrooms, etc.

In the past five years we've only had one flip like that. A house was bought a couple of years ago in 2017 and sold this year. The price was A$3000 more than they paid for it so not a real good result once all costs are factored in, but that price realized was the highest price on the street - ever.

Around here most places don't change hands very often. There are a few houses for sale now within a 1 kilometer range of us and the last time the one closest to us was sold was back in 1987 and the other 12 years ago.

There are also a couple of townhouses for sale as well with the closest one going for $770,000! Of the 20 or townhouses for sale in the suburb, only 4 are actually built and the others are still under construction!

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