Vol.32 - Land Banking – Could this be the Holy Grail of Investing? & Looking for a House – Your Real Estate Agent (Part Two)

**CONTENTS**

-Feature - Land Banking – Could this be the Holy Grail of Investing?
-From the Editor
-Yen Watch
-Events
-Job Watch
*Please scroll down below to read the disclaimer*

FEATURE

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Land Banking – Could this be the Holy Grail of Investing?
(By Stephen Huggins, TSI International Group KK | October 27, 2005 | Comment on this Article)

Land Banking and the Holy Grail
In this issue, I’ll briefly explain the concept of Land Banking and why this just may be the most solid, secure and profitable investment you can make. The Holy Grail of investing? That’s a BIG claim to live up to. Prior to joining another successful Land Banking firm in 1995, I was with an investment bank in Hong Kong. During that time we considered the “holy grail” to be any investment that would produce incredible returns with little or no risk. Unfortunately, during the investment banking years, the “holy grail” never really did appear. However, it did appear in 1995, which coincidentally, happens to be the same time I started my career in Land Banking.

Click here to read more....

FROM THE EDITOR

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Looking for a House – Your Real Estate Agent (Part Two)

As I described last week, I was at Century 21’s newly refurbished home center in Shibuya. I had just done the entry interview, had sat down with the store manager to pick out a set of likely targets, and arranged for a viewing the following weekend.

Just as with buying property overseas, the job of the real estate agent is to ferry you around to see these properties. This is particularly convenient, because with Japan’s arcane system of property addresses (no road names or numbers), finding a particular location – especially in older areas – can be both challenging and time consuming.

There is also a hierarchical system of real estate agents – the primary agent handling the property, who are often local and don’t have much marketing power – and the secondary agents who are the mass marketers and cover the whole of the country. Century 21 does have its own listings, but they are most useful in the fact that they cover through split deals with so many other primary agents as well.

Among other things, your agent has to spend a significant amount of time doing such mundane things as picking up of keys, or, more often, rendezvousing with the primary listing agent, who brings the keys and lets you in. For this reason, it can really take a lot of time to get around to see properties, and in Tokyo at least, I think it would be difficult to see more than 5-6 properties in a day… And that’s assuming that the agent assigned to you is working at optimal efficiency.

Unfortunately with the Century 21 folks, I got assigned someone quite green, and although she was nice enough, we soon got lost, we got stuck in traffic, and essential details about the properties were unknown. Considering that I’d indicated an interest in a healthy price bracket, I thought they would have looked after me better. As a result, I spent the best part of the day looking at just a few properties.

My wife on the other hand, decided to go on to the Internet and found a number of major sites, the most comprehensive (but with a lot of irritating repeat listings) being Recruit’s www.isize.com, that helped her drill down to agents whose names kept popping up and who seemed to have a handle on the market. One of these was Juken Housing. They in turn have an excellent web site www.juken-net.com, and as it turns out they also have a very knowledgeable team. Although the web site is in Japanese only, it is easy to use, and there are lots of photos – which give a good idea of what the property is like.

We also tried out a number of other realtors, including a couple of majors such as Sumitomo (now called Mitsubishi UFJ Fudosan Hanbai) www.sumai1.com and Mitsubishi. While they were professional in their approach, you couldn’t really compare them with the performance of the Juken Housing team, who were always on the ball and moved quickly to show us loads of properties. In fact, I’d have to say that the level of performance was night and day. With Juken and Sumitomo being at the top, and the others some way behind.

Next week I’ll go through the process of buying and what can and cannot be negotiated.

Terrie Lloyd
・・・Investor in Training/

YEN WATCH

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Currency	10/17 Mon	10/18 Tue	10/19 Wed	10/20 Thu	10/21 Fri
USD	114.94	116.30	116.80	116.54	116.30
GBP	204.53	204.57	204.82	206.18	207.68
EUR	139.58	139.86	139.77	139.92	140.57
CAD	97.85	99.16	99.84	99.77	99.60
HKD	15.09	15.27	15.33	15.30	15.27
SGD	68.14	68.96	69.16	69.02	69.02
AUD	87.78	88.11	88.29	88.57	88.74

(The above TTS Exchange Rates has been brought to you by the courtesy of GoLloyds TSB)
The above rates were posted at 10:09 on Friday, October 21, 2005 and are valid for funds received before 3:00 pm on Friday, October 21, 2005. All funds received after 3:00 pm are remitted the following day at the following day's exchange rates. The exchange rates provided are intended only as a guide. The Bank reserves the right to apply a different exchange rate if the market is particularly volatile.

EVENT

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No events this week.

JOB WATCH

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Brought to you by DaiJob, Inc – providing jobs for bilinguals.

- Product Specialist (Pre-Sales) - Treasury (JPY 7-12M)
- Senior Asset Management Compliance Officer (Negotiable)
- Asset & Liability Management Associate (Negotiable)
- Executive in Financial Control (Negotiable)
- Derivative Operations Middle Office (Negotiable)

Check out these and other jobs like these here!

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Edited by Burritt Sabin ([email protected])

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Disclaimer: This commentary is designed to help foreigners living in Japan understand the financial and investment opportunities available to them. It is NOT intended to constitute professional financial advice or an inducement to purchase the services and products mentioned. A condition of subscribing to this newsletter or reading this web site is that any actions taken by readers as a consequence of reading this column shall be the sole responsibility of the reader and no liability, implied or otherwise shall be assumed by Lloyd, Japan Inc. Communications, or other business entities related to either person.

© Japan Inc. Communications, 2005

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