Nearly two decades ago, Japan experienced the burst of an asset-inflated bubble economy that shattered the myth that property prices can continue to soar on the back of a roaring boom in the real estate industry.
Yet as Japanese property prices began to show signs of a turnaround from around 2002, condominium and office developers once again poured in to invest in the market, looking for big profits, and turning pieces of real estate into securitized products that were sold off to foreign and domestic funds.
And now the nation's real estate industry looks set for another long-term downturn after the collapse in recent months of droves of rapidly growing developers like Urban Corp. and Zephyr Co.