Foreign housing challenges and shifting Japanese attitudes in LIFULL 2026 report
A mammoth 182-page report released by LIFULL HOME’S Research Institute on September 29 paints a mixed picture of how foreign residents experience Japan’s housing market and how Japanese residents perceive the country’s growing foreign population.
Photo by Jakub Żerdzicki on Unsplash
On the foreign-resident side, many respondents reported difficulty finding housing, yet more than 80% were satisfied with the home they eventually secured.
On the Japanese side, direct negative experience was relatively limited and most respondents reported little or no everyday interaction with foreign residents.
Reported attitudes in 2026 nevertheless showed a downward trend compared with 2017.
The findings come against a very different demographic backdrop from eight years ago. Japan had about 4.13 million foreign residents at the end of 2025, up from roughly 2.56 million at the end of 2017 - an increase of about 61%.
LIFULL surveyed 1,704 foreign residents and 2,060 Japanese residents separately in 2026. The foreign-resident results were weighted to reflect the national composition of residence statuses.
The Foreign Experience
Only 8.3% of foreign respondents said they had experienced no difficulty when looking for housing.
The most common problem was encountering rental properties that required a guarantor they did not have, cited by 36.2%.
Another 33.7% said they had been refused a property introduction or contract after being identified as foreign, while 33.3% said they encountered many properties that did not accept foreign tenants.
Respondents could select multiple answers, so those percentages overlap.
The barriers were not identical across respondents. Some involved landlord acceptance and guarantor requirements, while others concerned access to housing information, language and communication with real estate companies.
But the picture changed once respondents secured a home.
More than 80% fell on the satisfied side of LIFULL’s housing-satisfaction scale.
The most frequently reported shortcomings were poor sound insulation, cited by 34.5%; high rent or purchase prices, 33.7%; and poor thermal insulation, 30.2%.
That creates one of the report’s clearest contrasts: getting access to housing appears to create more friction than living in the home once it has been secured.
Foreign residents are also not exclusively renters.
Rental housing accounted for 78% of respondents, but about one-fifth lived in homes they owned. Among those who had lived in Japan for at least 10 years, the homeownership share reached 44%.
Among current renters, just under 40% expressed some intention to buy a home in Japan.
These respondents should not be confused with non-resident overseas investors. They are people already living in Japan and participating in the domestic housing market as tenants, prospective homeowners and owner-occupiers.
Comparisons with LIFULL’s 2017 foreign-resident survey require caution. The earlier study covered five nationalities, while the 2026 survey covers 11 nationalities and regions, meaning the overall results are not a clean like-for-like measure of how housing conditions have changed.
The Japanese Experience
The Japanese survey shows a different tension between direct experience and broader attitudes.
When respondents were asked which troublesome behaviors by foreign residents they had personally experienced, 51.9% selected “none in particular.”
The most reported problems were groups making excessive noise, at 24.9%, and failure to follow garbage-disposal rules, at 18.4%.
Most respondents also had limited direct contact with foreign residents. Some 81.6% said they had little or no everyday interaction with them.
Reported attitudes in 2026 nevertheless showed a downward trend compared with 2017.
The share viewing an increase in foreign residents in their own neighborhood positively fell from 25.0% to 15.4%. The negative share rose from 31.0% to 41.2%.
In another comparable question, 59.5% associated an increase in settled foreign residents with higher crime, up from 48.1% in 2017.
Those changes need to be read against a substantially different social environment.
Japan’s foreign-resident population has grown by about 60% since the end of 2017. Inbound tourism has also risen sharply. Japan received about 28.7 million international visitors in 2017, compared with a record 42.7 million in 2025, an increase of roughly 49%.
That creates an additional limitation when interpreting the Japanese responses.
LIFULL distinguishes foreign residents from foreign tourists in some questions, but the Japanese survey does not appear to include a control mechanism designed to separate perceptions of foreign residents from perceptions shaped by encounters with foreign tourists.
That matters because the report separately found that about half of Japanese respondents frequently encountered foreign tourists in daily life. Tourist experiences may therefore have influenced some responses about foreign residents, although the survey does not measure the extent of that effect.
Nor does the survey establish that greater exposure to foreign residents or tourists caused attitudes to change.
What it does show is that broader concern has risen on several measures even though more than half of Japanese respondents reported none of the listed troublesome experiences and most had limited routine interaction with foreign residents.
How to Explore the Full Report With AI
At 182 pages, LIFULL’s report covers far more than can reasonably fit into a single article. It combines survey data, subgroup analysis, charts, commentary and broader discussion of foreign residents in Japan.
Readers who want to go deeper can download the full PDF and use an AI assistant to work through it section by section.
For a document of this size and complexity, a capable paid AI service is preferable where possible. Paid tiers are more likely to support large-file uploads, longer context windows and sustained analysis of charts, tables and lengthy reports.
Free services may still work, but users may need to split the PDF into smaller sections.
Some practical approaches are:
Start with a narrow question. Try prompts such as: “Summarize the housing findings for foreign residents,” “What does the report say about Japanese attitudes toward foreign residents?” or “Which findings changed most compared with 2017?”
Ask for subgroup analysis. For example: “How do housing experiences differ by age group?” “Do younger and older Japanese respondents report different attitudes toward foreign residents?” or “Does housing satisfaction vary by length of residence in Japan?”
Interrogate the methodology. Ask: “Which questions were multiple response?” “What respondent base was used for this chart?” or “Which 2017 comparisons are directly comparable and which are not?”
Separate data from interpretation. A useful prompt is: “Summarize only the survey findings and distinguish them from the authors’ commentary or analysis.”
Check important figures against the original page. Ask the AI to provide page references for any result you may want to quote or rely on.
It is better not to ask AI for a single summary of the entire report. Working through one section or question at a time is more likely to preserve the detail, caveats and methodological context that can disappear in a broad summary.
Further Reading:
LIFULL HOME’S Research Institute 182 Page Report (Japanese only)
Immigration Services Agency of Japan - Immigration and Foreign Resident Statistics (Japanese only)
Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism - Support for Foreign Nationals in Looking for Rental Housing (page in Japanese containing links to multilingual information)
