Hokkaido Newspaper. November 5, 2024.
    Hokkaido and Niseko region lift tickets to increase in price significantly. 1-day all four mountain pass now over 10,000 yen
    The Niseko region and the surrounding major ski resorts have once again raised the price of lift tickets substantially this winter. The one-day adult pass common to all four Niseko resorts has topped 10,000 yen for the first time, with Rusutsu Resort now charging 14,500 yen, the highest price in Japan. The aim is to make capital investments to cope with rising labor and fuel costs, as well as the sharp increase in overseas visitors, but the price is still significantly higher than that of large ski resorts outside Hokkaido, such as in Nagano and Niigata.
    The four Niseko resorts are Niseko Tokyu Grand Hirafu Ski Resort and Niseko Hanazono Resort in Kutchan Town, Niseko Village Ski Resort and Niseko Annupuri International Ski Resort in Niseko Town. The all-mountain pass, which allows skiing at any of the four resorts, is now 10,500 yen, up 10.5% from last winter.
    The one-day pass, which can only be used at Grand Hirafu and Hanazono, has increased 21.8% to 9,500 yen. Grand Hirafu is spending several billion yen to replace its main lifts with larger gondolas this year, and will continue to renovate the lifts next year and beyond. The management company asks for public understanding, saying, “We need to make these capital investments to make it easier for our customers to enjoy themselves.”
    The driving force behind the bold price hike is the sudden increase in overseas visitors, who accounted for about 80% of total visitors last winter. Looking at ski resorts around the world, one-day tickets cost about 45,000 yen at Vail in Colorado, about 16,500 yen at Zermatt in Switzerland, and over 20,000 yen at Perisher in Australia. Due in part to the depreciation of the yen, there is a growing belief that Japan is still inexpensive for overseas visitors, and there is room to raise prices.
    Rusutsu Resort has been raising its one-day ticket price every year, from 6,500 yen three seasons ago. This winter, it suddenly increased its price by 3,000 yen, and some say that Rusutsu has pushed the ceiling up, making it easier for other ski resorts to raise prices.
    However, in other areas of Hokkaido, ski lift passes are at about the same level as major ski resorts outside of Hokkaido. Furano Ski Resort costs 7,500 yen and Sahoro Resort (Shintoku Town) is 8,000 yen. Happo-one in Hakuba Village, Nagano, charges 8,000 yen and Naeba in Niigata costs 7,200 yen.  According to an industry insider, the reason that resorts such as Hakuba, which, like Niseko, are seeing a rapid increase in overseas visitors, are at this pricing level is because they are close to the Tokyo metropolitan area and the proportion of Japanese visitors is still high.
    Niseko and Rusutsu are encouraging cheaper online purchases and 30-hour passes that offer good value to local customers who ski frequently. Grand Hirafu and Hanazono have also offered a local discount of 40% off adult one-day passes for Kutchan town residents. However, use is limited to town residents, and a company employee in his 50s who lives in Kutchan worries that “unless the prices are affordable for families, the number of local skiers will inevitably decline.”
     According to the Hokkaido Cableway Association, a total of 42 million people were transported by lifts and gondolas at 90 ski resorts in Hokkaido last winter. The five ski resorts of Niseko and Rusutsu, which are popular with overseas visitors, accounted for one-third of that total.

Hokkaido Newspaper. October 23, 2024.
    Hokkaido Airports Corporation to test helicopter transport for wealthy clients to four major tourist destinations.
    Hokkaido Airports Corporation (HAP), based out of New Chitose Airport, with the cooperation of the cities of Chitose, Sapporo, Obihiro, and Kushiro will conduct the first demonstration test of passenger transportation by helicopter in late November, connecting four airports in Hokkaido with major tourist destinations. The aim is to create a new tourist route that will drastically shorten travel time, using the nearby airports as a base, and attract wealthy people from Japan and abroad. They plan to identify operational issues and set a path for commercialization for the future. 
    The implementation body is the Hokkaido Airport Secondary Transportation Improvement Review Committee, which was launched in August by Hokkaido Airports Corporation, the four cities in Hokkaido, the Hokkaido Bureau of Economy, Trade and Industry and the Hokkaido Economic Federation. Two round trips daily will be made by helicopter between New Chitose Airport and the Niseko ski resort area. Flights will also depart twice daily from Sapporo Okadama Airport to the Niseko area.  Two round trip daily flights will also leave from Obihiro Airport to the Furano ski resort area, and two round trip daily flights will run between Kushiro Airport and the Lake Mashu tourist area.
    It takes about two hours by car from New Chitose Airport to Niseko, but it takes only about 30 minutes by helicopter. The demonstration test will use a nine-seater aircraft, and takeoff and landing will be done on nearby ranches, farms and other areas other than the airport. In addition to representatives from constituent organizations on board, Hokkaido Airports Corporation will also be accepting applications from the general public.
    At some airports outside Hokkaido, such as Narita and Chubu Centrair, it is not uncommon for private companies to transport people by helicopter for tourism and other purposes, but this has not become a common practice within Hokkaido. Attracting wealthy travelers from Japan and abroad is one of the challenges for the tourism industry in Hokkaido, and HAP and others have focused on the usefulness of helicopters, which can travel at high speed to remote sightseeing spots, despite their high cost.
    In the future, Hokkaido Airports Corporation is also looking at replacing helicopters with self-driving and environmentally friendly flying cars.
    Hokkaido Airports Corporation officially announced on October 24 that they will be conducting a demonstration flights from November 26th to 28th using helicopters to visit nearby tourist sites, based out of the four major airports in Hokkaido. They will start accepting applications from the public from October 28. 
    On November 26, a helicopter with a capacity of 9 passengers will be used for a tour around Lake Mashu from Kushiro Airport, on November 27, a tour around Furano will depart from Obihiro Airport, and on November 28, a tour around Niseko will be conducted from New Chitose Airport, with a stopover at Sapporo Okadama Airport. On November 27, there will be a tour from Obihiro Airport to visit the Furano area. The flights will take place in the morning and afternoon, allowing visitors to enjoy the view from the sky and visit tourist facilities for approximately two hours.
    The aim is to check the operational system of helicopters that can travel at high speed and to attract more wealthy customers. The participation fee is 110,000 yen per person per trip. Applications must be made by November 8th. This is the link: https://www.z-leg.com/

​Hokkaido Newspaper. September 16, 2024.
   Apartment rents in Sapporo have risen by over 10% in one year caused by rising demand due to soaring housing prices. 
   Rent for rental apartments is rising in Sapporo. According to a private survey, the average (at the time of listing) for family properties is about 90,000 yen per month, up by more than 10% in the past year, and the highest price since the survey began in 2015. The background to this is the rise in construction costs, as well as the rise in demand due to the increasing home sales prices. Demand for high-end properties with full facilities is also strong, which is pushing up the overall market.
   “We receive applications immediately when newer family properties are listed. With the soaring sales prices of condominiums and detached houses, more people are choosing to rent, so there is a lot of demand,” said a representative of Big, a major rental real estate agency based in Hokkaido.
   According to the company, rising construction costs such as labor and material costs have led to higher rents for newly built properties, and in light of this situation, an increasing number of landlords have been raising rents by several thousand yen since last year in line with tenant changes. Another factor that is pushing up the market price is the increasing number of cases where investors are buying condominiums such as tower-type apartments and renting them out at high rents.
   According to At Home, a real estate information service company based in Tokyo, the average asking rent for family-orientated apartments (50-70 square meters) in Sapporo in July was 89,968 yen. This is an 11.9% increase from the same month last year, and the highest price for three consecutive months. Although the average rent for single people-orientated units (30 square meters or less) rose 5.3% to 43,001 yen and for apartments targeted at couples (30-50 square meters) rose 2.9% to 60,487 yen, the increase for families is dramatically noticeable.
   Demand for luxury rental properties is expected to grow, especially among those with a certain income who would have previously considered purchasing a home and developers are also looking for new business opportunities. Ushio Sangyo, based in Hakodate, which deals in rental housing, has seven luxury apartments made of reinforced concrete and steel in Sapporo. The apartments have high ceilings and facilities that are rare in rental properties, such as island-type kitchens and bathrooms with TVs.
   Although construction costs are about 10% higher than for a normal property, the rent can also be set at nearly 10% higher, and the company is confident that “demand is increasing for people who want to live in a good building even if it's a little more expensive.” In some cases, even when the rent for a 4-bedroom apartment (approximately 120 square meters) which was 200,000 yen when it was newly built two years ago, was raised to 250,000 yen, tenants were found and the apartments remain fully occupied.
   According to statistics from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism, the number of rental housing starts in Sapporo from January to June this year increased 7.2% compared to the same period last year, a significant increase compared to custom-built homes (up 1.6%) and condominiums (down 28.6%). Sapporo real estate analyst Shingo Shida said, “Property maintenance costs and landlord living expenses are also rising, so rents will continue to rise. However, there is a limit to how much rent can increase when real wages are not increasing, and the number of properties that have increased will likely lead to a battle between the fittest and the weakest.”

HokkaidoNewspaper. September 3, 2024.
   In Niseko small plots of land purchased through the wilderness sales method are now being turned into residential land as the ski resort area booms in popularity. 
    In Japanese, Genya Shoho, is the term used to apply to a fraudulent business practice that involves deceiving people into buying worthless land such as wilderness. Its heyday was from the 1960s to the 1980s, and solicitations were actively carried out using newspaper inserts and magazine advertisements. The land is sold under the deception of promises that it will rise in value in the future.
   This practice in English is best known as swampland in Florida, which is a figure of speech referring to real estate scams in which a seller misrepresents unusable swampland as developable property or nonexistent oceanfront property in Arizona.
  In recent years, there has been an increase in secondary damage caused by tactics such as soliciting the resale of land acquired through wilderness land sales and then making people pay fees for the resale. In some cases, it is not recognized as fraud, such as when land is purchased with the aim of making a profit by reselling it after prices have risen.
   In the world-famous ski resort town of Niseko, there is movement on so-called wilderness sales land that was bought and sold for investment purposes in the 1970s and 1980s and left abandoned. With the increase in tourism-related jobs, immigrants have purchased the land as relatively cheap residential land. In some cases, the land has been sold for a higher price than the original owner purchased it for. In areas deep in the mountains where development is difficult, a local public-private partnership has begun to manage and utilize forest resources on behalf of landowners.
   Increasing consultations at local real estate companies.
   “We have been receiving more consultations about land purchased through the wilderness sales method since 7 or 8 years ago. One of the reasons is probably that the rise in land prices in Niseko has attracted attention nationwide,” says Mr. Tateno, President of Niseko Land and Buildings, a local real estate company.
   The wilderness land business, which tricks people into buying land that is almost worthless at high prices by telling them that villas will be developed in the future and they link the land to false resort developments and plans for the construction of Shinkansen and expressways that are in the planning stages, and falsely explain that land prices are sure to rise. A lot of land around Niseko Town was bought and sold at unfair practices and prices.
   A lot of land in Hokkaido and Okinawa was sold to people in the Tokyo metropolitan area. It was difficult to visit the site and inspect the land, and even if they did visit, they were shown someone else’s land that was different from the land being sold.
   Developers abused the system that allowed them to freely divide a single piece of land into subdivisions, and in the vast wilderness that is only appraised at a few yen per tsubo, they registered the subdivisions piece by piece as if they had drawn orderly city blocks and roads as if they had been rezoned, and then sold these fictitious city blocks and roads to numerous victims at high prices of several million yen per section.
   According to lawyer Mr. Arai, based in Maebashi City, who is knowledgeable about the wilderness land business, “The buyers are getting older and are approaching the time of inheritance. They may only realize that the land is a waste when they inherit it, or they may decide to dispose of it themselves, thinking that they cannot pass it on to their children or grandchildren.” However, it is extremely difficult to find someone willing to buy it, and even if there is a buyer, it is common for the price to be lower than the purchase price.
   In Niseko, the rapid development of the resort area, which was unimaginable half a century ago, has been a driving force.
   The Toyosato district is about 20 minutes by car from the area where the ski resorts and hotels and businesses are concentrated. There is an area here that is the remains of a wilderness land business scheme. According to the government land registry, about 50,000 square meters of land was divided into about 80 lots. The owners of each of the approximately 600 square meter plots live all over the country, including Aomori, Kanagawa, and Niigata, and many of them were purchased in 1976.
   In some cases, the price has risen since the time of purchase.
   The plots had been left abandoned as wilderness, but in recent years, more have been sold. One of the buyers is a woman (38) from Sapporo who works at a real estate company in the town's resort area. She moved here with her husband from Australia about five years ago and lived in a rental house in the town, but purchased land from an owner in Nagano in June last year and built a new detached house in December.
   “We chose this place because it's relatively affordable and we can avoid the noise of the resort,” the woman said. Construction of new detached houses is also progressing on the surrounding land.
   The number of people moving to Niseko Town is on the rise, and the population, which was about 4,500 in 1990, had risen to 5,162 as of the end of March this year. The reason for this is the fact that the town offers an environment where you can enjoy skiing and snowboarding in the winter and outdoor activities in the summer, as well as the growth in employment in tourism and real estate.
   Due to active investments in resorts, land prices around the town’s ski resorts and traditional residential areas have risen. Demand for relatively cheap residential land has been moving to suburban and mountainous areas. The number of people in their 30s and 40s who have moved to the Toyosato area has also increased, and the local elementary school expanded its school building in 2022.
  “I can't disclose the amount, but there have been cases where the price exceeds the price purchased through the wilderness sales method,” said Mr. Tateno. However, even in Niseko, the only land that actually finds a buyer is one with good conditions, such as facing a road and no restrictions on building houses. “95% of the land we are consulted about is deep in the mountains or on cliffs, and it is difficult to sell,” said Mr. Tateno.
   Fragmented land, public and private sectors to utilize forests.
   The wilderness sales method involved dividing land into small plots and selling it, which led to an increase in landowners, making large-scale development in the area difficult. In mountainous areas, the method ultimately led to the protection of forests on the land, but proper management such as thinning and timber utilization remains an issue.
  According to the town of Niseko, the area of ​​natural forest within the town is about 10,000 hectares, of which more than 2,000 hectares are owned by domestic landowners from outside Hokkaido. In some places, more than 5,000 owners are registered on a forest property of just under 470 hectares, and the influence of the wilderness sales method remains strong.
   Local public and private sectors have begun to take action to utilize the forests.
   In 2023, the town formulated an implementation plan for its forest vision and begin a survey of the intentions of landowners whose land was bought under the wilderness sales method. It has also begun preparations to establish “management rights” that will allow the town to manage the forested land on behalf of the landowners.
   In the same year, Niseko Town established a limited liability company with local forestry workers to handle forest maintenance and timber sales. It aims to maintain the forest and use the forest products produced from thinning and other activities both within and outside the town.
   A representative of Niseko Town's Agriculture Department said, “We would like to explore a system to circulate abandoned forest resources and leave a rich forest for the next generation.” The town's efforts are attracting attention from other cities and towns with forests that are owned by many landowners bought through the wilderness sales method. 
   To address this problem, the Japanese Government will make land registration mandatory from 2024. In addition, the Japanese Government started the “Inherited Land National Treasury Transfer System” in April 2023. 
   This program will help those who have inherited wilderness land by paying the Japanese Government a fee of 200,000 yen to take over the property. However, there are many hurdles to overcome in getting the government to take over hopeless land that has been sold through the wilderness sales method. The boundary markers of the property must be clear, and there must not be any buildings on the land (many wilderness plots were sold with houses attached as holiday homes and then left abandoned), the land cannot be polluted (many wilderness areas were used by companies to illegally dump industrial waste in the absence of landowners), and it cannot be on a cliff (there are many cases of fraudulent sales of land that is practically impossible to use).

July 2, 2024. Hokkaido Newspaper.

      Chinese company sells Tomamu Ski Resort due to domestic real estate downturn. Hoshino Resort to continue management of the resort. 
    Chinese investment company Fosun International announced on July 2, that it would sell the resort facility Hoshino Resort Tomamu, located in Shimukappu Village. The sale price is about 40.8 billion yen. As the real estate market in China continues to deteriorate, Fosun International is disposing of non-core assets to reduce their corporate debt, and this sale is seen as part of that effort. Hoshino Resorts, based in Karuizawa, Nagano Prefecture, will continue to operate the resort.
     The decision to sell was made at a board meeting on June 26 by Shanghai Yuyuan Tourist Mart, based in Shanghai, a subsidiary of Fosun International that held ownership and the largest retailing conglomerate in China. 
     Almost all shares of the subsidiary company that owns Hoshino Resort Tomamu will be sold to YCH16, a LLC based in Minato Ward, Tokyo, that invests in real estate. According to the official registry, this company was established on May 10 of this year.
     Hoshino Resort Tomamu includes a ski resort and a hotel, which Shanghai Yuyuan acquired from a US and Dutch investment fund in 2015 for approximately 18.3 billion yen. According to Chinese media, business had been growing steadily until 2019, but the number of visitors has dropped sharply since 2020 due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Hokkaido ski resort is popular among Chinese tourists.
     Fosun International, is a conglomerate involved in real estate, pharmaceuticals, retail and other businesses. It acquired many foreign companies and rapidly expanded its overseas business, but its debt burden has become heavy due to the real estate slump in China, and in recent years it has been selling off its overseas assets one after another.
     A representative for Hoshino Resorts Tomamu said in a public relations statement, “The owner has changed, however, our company will continue to operate the resort and the property.”