You Can Buy This $5,500 House In Japan—And There Are Millions More Like It

Source: Fast Company, Adele Peters
Photo: Courtesy of AkiyaMart

Japan has millions of ‘akiya’ (literally, empty houses) that have been abandoned. A new site aims to connect foreigners with these inexpensive properties.

On the coast of Japan, southwest of Tokyo, it’s possible to buy a little house with a view of the ocean for $37,000. In Kyoto, you can buy a house in walking distance from historic temples for $80,000. And near the city of Kitakyushu, you can buy a traditional house from 1868, surrounded by forests and a huge garden, for $5,500.

The homes are all akiya (literally, “empty houses”) that have been abandoned. Across Japan, there are millions of similar homes, mostly in rural areas. A new site called AkiyaMart lists the properties in English for Americans and other foreigners looking for an alternative to the unaffordable housing in their own neighborhoods.

The founders, Take Kurosawa and Joey Stockermans, first met while visiting Japan as exchange students in college. A decade later, after working for years in the tech industry (in the Bay Area and New York City, respectively), they were disillusioned by the cost of living in the United States. Despite having good jobs, neither of them could afford to buy single-family homes. In Silicon Valley, where Kurosawa worked, a typical house costs well over $1 million. At the same time, they kept seeing photos of charming, cheap akiya on Instagram. When their jobs were both hit by layoffs, they started talking about buying a place in Japan.

“Both of us wanted a reason to spend more time in Japan going forward in life,” says Stockermans. “We saw these cheap properties, and the two things just kind of made sense together.”

Japan has nearly 9 million akiya, by one estimate. By 2033, there may be as many as 23 million abandoned homes, or roughly a third of all the houses in the country. That’s partly because the country’s population is shrinking, and also because most people want to move to Tokyo for work. If someone inherits a house in a rural area, they may not want it.

“It’s not just rural in terms of countryside,” Stockermans says. “It’s medium-sized cities—150,000 or 300,000 population towns—where these homes exist as well. There’s no jobs in these satellite cities for young people. Everyone wants to live in Tokyo, because that’s where the jobs are.” Though many people worked remotely during the pandemic, they were expected to go back to the office afterward, he says.

Tokyo itself is very affordable by the standards of an American city. Even if someone only earns minimum wage, they can afford to live by themselves. In the U.S., by contrast, in more than 90% of all counties, a one-bedroom apartment is out of reach for a minimum-wage worker. Tokyo is a perfect illustration of the fact that if a city builds enough housing, that housing will be affordable. Because of the abundant supply in Tokyo and other large Japanese cities, there’s little demand for akiya elsewhere.

When Kurosawa and Stockermans started searching for akiya themselves, with the idea that they would spend part of the year in Japan and also rent out the property on Airbnb, they found Japanese real estate sites hard to navigate. “We got really frustrated—the [user interface] is just very differently geared than a Zillow or a Redfin,” says Kurosawa. So Stockermans, a software engineer, mocked up a tool that made it possible to filter listings and read details in English. “He created a prototype, and we actually found our house with the tool,” Kurosawa says. “When we launched it publicly in January, we saw a huge demand from people looking for something similar.”

Since finding the listing is just the first step, the startup is now also working with bilingual Japanese real estate agents to help buyers through the rest of the process. Part of the challenge is the fact that because the houses are so cheap, commissions are also low. Because of that, buyers who need AkiyaMart’s help finding a realtor pay a $2,000 fee, most of which goes to the local realtor. Earlier this week, the company helped a buyer close on a house that cost only $6,000. That’s the equivalent of three months’ rent for a studio apartment in San Francisco.

The houses on the site range in price; some are hundreds of thousands of dollars or even in the millions. But a large number are deeply affordable—$100,000 or far less. Even the cheapest houses are often in relatively good condition, the company says, though they may need to be modernized with insulation or earthquake-proofing.

They bought their own first house in Beppu, a city known for its hot springs, after Kurosawa visited the area on a surfing trip with his fiancé. The house cost $42,000. Because they decided to turn it into an Airbnb, they spent another $30,000 to give it high-end finishes. The house was essentially livable even without the changes, they say. They recently bought another house in Tokyo. They both now spend part of the year in Japan; Kurosawa now also owns a mobile home in California and Stockermans stays with family in Canada when he’s not in Japan. (The startup is a side project for Kurosawa, and Stockermans is working on it full time.)

Unsurprisingly, using the house as a vacation spot is easier than trying to permanently relocate. Japan allows tourists to visit for three months twice a year. The country also recently introduced a new digital nomad visa that lets remote workers stay for six months consecutively (and reapply to come back after another six months). But it is also possible for people who are self-employed to go through the paperwork to get a longer working visa.

If people who relocate are respectful of local culture and attempt to speak Japanese, they’ll be welcome, say Kurosawa and Stockermans. “When we moved into our neighborhood, we were kind of the glimmering hope—the young guys who are cleaning up the house,” Stockermans says. “I think it was really well received. People are happy even if we’re foreigners.”

https://www.fastcompany.com/91153794/japan-affordable-housing-akiya