Both of the Act on Advancement of Proper Condominium Management and the Act on Facilitation of Reconstruction of Condominiums were revised on June, 2020. While owners of condos should manage their own property, some condos without proper management have appeared to suffer adverse effect （or sometimes nuisance）to the surrounding areas and residents. This amendment enables the municipal government to advise them to improve their management, and to certify plans of management developed by the owners so that the way of maintenance would be referred in the condos market. Also, more than 80 percent of the owners of condos, which are identified by the municipal government as “highly necessary to demolish” for the reason of their cracked walls, would be able to determine to sell the condos and sites as a whole to developers in order to speed up decisionmaking among the owners whether to keep maintaining or to reconstruct, to sustain the living environment which constitutes public interest.

The Standard Condominium Management Bylaws, published by the government for reference when condominium owners freely create Condominium Management Bylaws, was revised in 2016 to ensure communication between owners. Explain the content and purpose of the amendment as to what kind of problem was solved and how.

The legal system about the management of the condominium in Belize is characterized by the three points: (1) the owners are required to pay for insurance for the repair or rebuilding of the condominium building to avoid the risk of financial deficit, (2) the simple majority of the owners is required for most decisions about the management even for one about the rebuilding of the condominium building, (3) the developer of the condominium building has a wide range of freedom about the contents of the bylaw of the management of the condominiums which the buyers have to abide by after the sales. In contrast, in Japan, it takes lots of time and cost to negotiate and reach the conclusion about the management and rebuilding of the condominium building, there are lots of default of management fees, and there are lots of mandated articles in the bylaw, all of which leads to the deterioration of the quality of the condominium building. Thus there is a big room for Japan to admit the simple and clear legal system as we see in Belize. The auction system of Belize is also clearly defined and smoothly operated at low cost without the overprotection of renters while Japan’s system suffers not only from the blockage of the auction process by antisocial groups, but high cost and the low price of the auctioned real estate. Again there are lots of lessons we should learn from Belize.

Japan’s laws about the condominiums are comprised of the private ones and public ones, both of which impose quite high transaction cost on the owners so that there are few renovations of decrepit and functionally obsolete condominium buildings even if many condominium owners hoped for it. First of all the law only allows the rebuilding of the condominium building on the same plot by the same owners even if the location does not fit it. It is irrational to prohibit the conversion of the land use to another which most efficiently fits the location. Second of all the sale of the plot is allowed only if the condominium building is structurally hazardous as in the case of the lack of earthquake safety without regard to the owners' sales need, however strong it would be, out of functional obsolescence or inconvenience. Third of all it is irrational not to allow the simultaneous sales of the condominium building and its plot to keep the building itself, with the dissolution of the joint ownership of its common facilities and plot. There would be many possible buyers in the hope of converting the building into the hotel, nursing home, and others if the whole building and the plot are in one ownership. In consideration of the effect of the efficient use of the stock of condominium buildings in such a way, we should allow the simultaneous sales of the condominium building and its plot. And finally, fourth of all, we should promote the recruitment of the experts of management to reduce the risk of moral hazards in condominium management.

This paper examines the impact of housing search methods on subsequent residential satisfaction among Japanese homeowners. Our empirical results based on the structural equation modeling show that using the Internet or visiting housing exhibits during a search process can improve subsequent residential satisfaction. These results are consistent with the notion that these information search methods can alleviate information asymmetry or provide more information about properties available on the market. Furthermore, the positive effects of the internet search on residential satisfaction can be observed for custom-build homes and second-hand homes but not for houses built for sale.

This paper focused on a method of data cleansing for used condominium database that is open to the public by the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism. By identifying and removing error records, which are not transaction outliers, it enables us to analyze this dataset appropriately. In this study, we proposed two methods to deal with serious error, that is suspect of “Fat finger error”. In addition, as a result of noise removal, the analysis results using the hedonic model have improved significantly.