Olympic Games Bring Hotel Construction Boom to Japan

With the 2020 Olympic Games ahead, Japan is seeing a veritable hotel construction boom in the capital Tokyo and beyond. Numbers from the MLIT and the Statistics Bureau show that hotel construction orders doubled for fiscal year 2016 (runs until March 2017) and grew by another 30 percent for fiscal year 2017 (until March 2018.)

Tokyo in particular is seeing an immense amount of construction. According to the Urban Research Institute Corporation, 130 hotels have opened in the Japanese capital in 2018 alone and 190 are still to be completed before 2020. All this certainly means that real estate prices in Tokyo have been climbing ever higher. Even though the number of tourists visiting Japan has nearly tripled in the past five years, experts have warned about a post-Olympic industry collapse if property is sold at inflated rates.

Hotel construction has not only picked up in Tokyo, but also in other major Japanese cities expecting an influx of tourists in 2020. Sometimes, this building boom also had some side effects. In Kyoto, a temple from the Heian period was found when excavations for a new hotel began.