What if you bought Tokyo apartment in 1990?
Real estate · House. The hindsight answer, year by year, against the only benchmark that matters.
Could you have picked it? Play0.9× · S&P 500 same money: $19,429
$1,000 in Tokyo apartment at the start of 1990 would be worth about $950 today. A plain S&P 500 index fund over the same years would have made more — the boring option won.
The story
This position starts at the worst possible moment: the peak of Japan's bubble economy around 1990, when land prices had soared on cheap credit and the grounds of Tokyo's Imperial Palace were said to be worth as much as all of California. The Bank of Japan tightened policy, the bubble burst, and Japanese property prices began a slide that lasted well over a decade, through banking crises, deflation and Japan's lost decades. Tokyo apartments lost around half their value by the early 2000s.
Tokyo then stabilised, helped by its unusually permissive zoning, which allowed constant new construction and kept rents affordable compared with other global cities. From 2013, Abenomics, ultra-low interest rates, Tokyo's successful Olympic bid and a weak yen attracted domestic and foreign buyers, and new condominium prices in central Tokyo reached record highs in the 2020s even after the Bank of Japan began raising rates in 2024. Even so, in this series Tokyo apartments had still not regained their 1990 level by 2026, more than three decades later.
The lesson: Buying at the peak of a credit bubble can mean waiting more than a generation to break even, even in one of the world's most dynamic cities.
$1,000 invested at the start of each year
| Bought in | Price then | Worth today | S&P 500 would be | Multiple |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1990 | $100 | $950 | $19,429 | 0.9× |
| 1995 | $65.00 | $1,462 | $14,783 | 1.5× |
| 2000 | $55.00 | $1,727 | $4,626 | 1.7× |
| 2003 | $50.00 | $1,900 | $7,727 | 1.9× |
| 2005 | $52.00 | $1,827 | $5,763 | 1.8× |
| 2007 | $58.00 | $1,638 | $4,789 | 1.6× |
| 2008 | $60.00 | $1,583 | $4,626 | 1.6× |
| 2010 | $55.00 | $1,727 | $6,071 | 1.7× |
| 2012 | $55.00 | $1,727 | $5,312 | 1.7× |
| 2015 | $62.00 | $1,532 | $3,301 | 1.5× |
| 2018 | $70.00 | $1,357 | $2,519 | 1.4× |
| 2020 | $75.00 | $1,267 | $2,092 | 1.3× |
green = beat the S&P 500 · red = lost money
Best entry point in our set: 2003, turning $1,000 into $1,900. The S&P 500 from that same year: $7,727.
Now try it without hindsight. The wheel decides the year and the asset class, you pick the position, ten seconds a pick, and we simulate to today. Tokyo apartment is one of 258 positions on the wheel — including the ones that went to zero.
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