Southeast Asian developers are trying to attract Japanese retirees, hoping that low-cost homes and health care will help create a profitable niche market.
Although the Australian Gold Coast and Hawaii have been favored destinations for elderly Japanese in the past, Thailand, the Philippines and Malaysia are now promoting "long stay" programs that offer foreign retirees visas and tax breaks.
Home builders are hoping that what today is a trickle — only 1 in 3,000 Japanese pensioners lives abroad — will become a steady flow, because people over the age of 50 in Japan hold 75 percent of individual wealth there.
In the Philippines, which would like to attract about a million foreign retirees by 2015 and thereby create four million related jobs, Robinson Land plans to build houses for Japanese, who more used to living in cramped apartments.
"A government is selling the Philippines as a retirement destination, so we're looking at building leisure retirement villas," Frederick Go, president of Robinson Land, said at a recent conference in Hong Kong.
source: International Herald TribuneLinkback:
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