Greater Tokyo's Average New Condo Price Jumped 63.7% in July to a Record ¥164.93 Million
Greater Tokyo's average new-build condominium price hit ¥164.93 million in July, up 63.7% in a year — but one Minato high-rise did much of the lifting.
The Real Estate Economic Institute reported on 20 August 2026 that the average price of a newly launched condominium across Greater Tokyo reached ¥164.93 million in July, 63.7% higher than a year earlier. In the capital's 23 central wards the average was ¥265.20 million — roughly $1.7 million — which Japan Today reported as a 96% annual increase and only the second month on record above ¥200 million.
A single tower can move a whole month
The institute did not present the number as a broad repricing. It attributed the jump to high construction costs and to sales of high-end high-rise units in Minato Ward and elsewhere, with an official noting that "with limited supply, large-scale developments can have an outsized impact on the market." Only 2,145 units were released across Tokyo and the three surrounding prefectures, up 6.9% year on year. On that base, a few hundred apartments priced in the hundreds of millions of yen are enough to drag the mean upward.
The per-square-metre figure gives a cleaner read. It rose 50.8% year on year — still an extraordinary move, but 13 percentage points below the headline average, which is what happens when the mix shifts toward larger, more expensive units rather than every unit simply costing more.
Demand did not crack
Buyers absorbed the launches anyway. The first-month contract rate came in at 69.5%, up 1.5 percentage points from July 2025 — meaning roughly seven in ten of the units released found a buyer within four weeks at these prices.
Supply remains concentrated in the centre. The 23 wards accounted for 1,028 of the 2,145 units, just under half the month's total. Kanagawa contributed 574, Saitama 248, Chiba 218, and suburban Tokyo only 77. Average prices outside the core sit in an entirely different band: ¥105.59 million in suburban Tokyo, ¥76.93 million in Chiba, ¥72.34 million in Kanagawa and ¥59.37 million in Saitama. A Saitama new-build costs less than a quarter of a central-Tokyo one.
What the citywide numbers show
Glopra's own Tokyo snapshot, dated 17 August 2026, puts the citywide average at $11,134 per square metre with a gross rental yield of 3.59% and annual price growth of 9.3% in yen. In dollar terms that same growth is 1.0%, because the yen absorbed most of it. Our Tokyo reading carries an elevated bubble-risk band.
The gap between +9.3% citywide and +63.7% for July's new launches is not a contradiction — it is the difference between a broad market measure and one month of developer pricing in the most expensive districts. For anyone tracking Tokyo, the per-square-metre series and the citywide index will tell you more about direction than a monthly average that a single Minato project can rewrite.
The risk in reading it either way
Construction costs are real and persistent, and the contract rate says buyers are not balking yet. But a 63.7% headline built on 2,145 units is thin evidence for a market-wide shift, and the institute's own commentary says so. August's release, with a different project mix, could just as easily print a large decline without anything having changed underneath.
Sources: Real Estate Economic Institute https://www.fudousankeizai.co.jp/share/mansion/685/hyke9Ya1.pdf; Japan Today https://japantoday.com/category/business/central-tokyo-average-condo-price-up-96-to-record-high-in-july