In Osaka an older flat sells for a quarter of a new one. July 2026

Age takes three quarters of the price

Sorting everything advertised for sale in Osaka on 28 July by the age of the building, the median price per square metre is highest in the newest band and lowest in the oldest. The gap is more than fourfold.

Apply the same bands to rentals and the decline is nothing like as steep. Between the newest and oldest bands rents do not even halve.

So in Osaka an ageing building loses a great deal of its sale value and rather little of its rent. The older the property, the more rent it earns relative to what it costs to buy. That gap between the two tables is precisely why an investor watching yield looks at older stock. You can calculate the yield for a specific property, or explore price against building age across the city.

Tokyo shows the same direction, but Osaka's slope is markedly steeper. On these numbers, the case for buying older is stronger here than in the capital.

Asking prices are falling

Sale asking prices in Osaka moved -0.85% during July on a matched-listing basis.

Matched-listing means we take only the properties advertised in both observations and compare each against its own previous price. Lining up median listing prices month to month cannot separate a change in price from a change in what happens to be listed. The comparison never rests on fewer than 8,090 matched listings.

All 4 observations in July were declines. None was an increase.

A property that sells disappears from 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. Read this as what happened to prices that kept being advertised, not as a statement about the market as a whole.

When a price moved, it almost always moved down

Of the 10,924 sale listings we could follow through July, 15.1% changed price. Among those 1,709 revisions, 96.5% were cuts, with a median cut of -3.81%.

There is little to separate the wards. In Nishiyodogawa, Tennoji and Minato every single revision was downward; even Tsurumi, the lowest, sits at 92.7%. No particular district is being sold off. The whole city points the same way.

To be explicit, because the figure invites misreading: 100% does not mean every listing in that ward was cut. It means every listing that changed price was cut. Most listings ended July at the price they started it.

Of 9,934 sale listings, 3LDK and 2LDK together are more than half. What is on the market here is family housing.

Levels

As at 28 July the median advertised sale price was 3,980 man-yen, or 53.7 man-yen per square metre. A median moves with the mix of what is listed, so read it as a level rather than a trend.

About this data

We observed the market on 5 days during July, recording 49,401 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, so the depth reached varies sharply from day to day. Matching two shallow days against each other yields a base skewed toward newly listed property, which is not sound enough to publish for Osaka. The age and layout composition above is taken from the deepest collection day in the period. Building age is recorded on 69.8% of rental listings.

Data and methodology