Japanese Real Estate Boom

After a short pause, the Japanese real estate market is booming once again:

April 3 (Bloomberg) -- Japan's rising land prices herald the economy's return to inflation, and may lift the yen, stocks and bond yields, Lehman Brothers Japan Inc. said.

Land prices nationwide climbed 0.4 percent in 2006, the first increase in 16 years, the government said last month. Commercial prices in the three largest cities rose 8.9 percent with values in some parts of Tokyo jumping as much as 46 percent.

...Japan's land prices plunged after the bubble economy burst in the early 1990s, loading banks with trillions of yen in bad loans. Lending began to climb in February 2006 after a decade of contraction as banks wrote off the loans and companies repaid debt.

Of course, in Japan's case the "pause" that I mentioned was 16 years long, and the "boom" to which I referred is an annual increase in prices of less than one-half of one percent. But hey, at least real estates prices are rising again in Japan.

Remind me again who it is that suggests that real estate prices don't ever go down for long?