In Kobe, building age reaches the rent too. July 2026

Rent falls with age here, and elsewhere it does not

Median rent per square metre in Kobe drops by more than half between the newest and oldest building-age bands.

That is unusual. The same gap is under 40% in Sapporo and around 40% in Kyoto and Osaka. Across every city we have looked at, the pattern has been that sale prices fall sharply with building age while rents largely hold. Kobe breaks it.

Sale prices fall too, of course, by more than 70%.

For an investor the gap between those two declines is the whole argument. In Osaka sale prices fell 76% against rents falling 41%, a 35 point gap in favour of buying older. In Kobe it is 74% against 54%, a gap of 20. Within the same region, older stock is a materially weaker yield proposition here than across the bay. To check a specific property you can calculate the yield, or explore price against building age across Kobe.

Worth noting alongside it: buildings over forty years old are 30% of Kobe's sale listings.

Prices are falling

Sale asking prices moved -0.99% during July on a matched-listing basis, with all 4 observations declining. The comparison never rests on fewer than 4,197 matched listings.

A property that sells leaves the listings and drops out of the matched set, so what remains leans toward listings that did not sell, which are the ones under most pressure to reduce.

Of the 5,661 listings we could follow, 14.2% changed price. Among those 838 revisions, 95.1% were cuts, with a median cut of -3.88%.

The wards differ little. Every revision in Nada was a cut; Tarumi, the lowest, is 92.9%.

What is on the market

3LDK leads the 5,084 sale listings, while 1K is a third of the 22,969 rentals.

Levels

The median advertised sale price was 2,650 man-yen, or 31.1 man-yen per square metre. Read it as a level rather than a trend.

About this data

We observed the market on 5 days during July, recording 25,227 sale listing observations. These are asking prices, not transaction prices.

This report carries no rental price movement and no rental ward breakdown. Rental collection runs newest-first and stops once it is into listings already held, and in Kobe the deepest day held nearly seven times the rows of the shallowest, which leaves no sound basis for matching. The age and layout composition comes from the deepest collection day in the period. Building age is recorded on 93.1% of rentals.

Data and methodology