Hotels are new darling of foreign investors in Japanese property

TOKYO -- Investors remain bullish about Japan's property market this year. Funding is easy to come by, despite the county's first interest rate hike in 17 years in March. Further fueling their optimism is a flood of overseas tourists, workers returning to the office in droves and rising rents.

Not everything will be a repeat of last year, though. Hotels and apartment buildings, rather than warehouses, are expected to be hot in 2024, with less leveraged investors expected to play a more prominent role, including sovereign wealth and public pension funds, said Yuto Ohigashi, senior director of research at Jones Lang LaSalle (JLL), a property market specialist. Such investors are less affected by rising interest rates and have more capacity to deploy capital in overseas real estate, Ohigashi said.