Transcript
Speaker: Two handwritten notes. He left them inside the house. He still has a key to the house, right? He was doing work, renovating our property, and then he went missing. Please! exclamation mark Banks are not available.
Speaker: Don't let them know it's cash. Can you mail it to me like a document? Please! exclamation
Speaker: Welcome back, welcome back. Apologies in advance, there's a little bit of background noise, we're sitting outside right now. In the Mentawai Islands of Indonesia, I am a throwing my bachelor party, doing a surf Indonesia retreat, so Joey, thanks all for coming to the bachelor party.
Speaker: Before we get into Japanese real estate stuff, what are your thoughts on Indonesia, man? You've been looking for a spot to retreat during the winters. Could this be a candidate? Yeah, I live in Canada, so winter kind of cold.
Speaker: Hoping to avoid Canadian winters long term in my life. So curious about a lot of tropical places, been thinking about Okinawa or some other warm places in Japan.
Speaker: It's humid here, I think is the overwhelming feeling. It's quite warm and the water is beautiful. The water is like bath water, really warm. Warmer than Hawaii water. Mentawai Islands is a pretty far journey. You got to fly to Jakarta, then Jakarta, go to Padang, and then Padang, you got to take speedboat over. It's a brutal journey. It was a long trip to get here. What's the wave quality, surf quality? Waves really good, Hawaii quality, if not better.
Speaker: Things are looking up, Joey. We haven't done one of these Deer Diaries series for a while, so while we had a little bit of downtime between surf sessions. Yeah, we got a lot of good news. We also have some bad news, too. All right, let's start with the bad.
Speaker: As everybody knows, we source our listings from a bunch of different Japanese websites. And one of our scrapers went down this week. One of the websites did a redesign. I noticed it maybe after one day, frantically trying to get that scraper back up. But I am on Indonesian internet on a beach. island right now so yeah i was thinking about that meme where it's like born too soon to explore the world on a big ship born too early to explore the galaxy on a spaceship but born just at the right time to debug software issues from a beach in indonesia hell yeah not the worst place to try to solve this website issue but yeah one of our scrapers is down at the time of recording here very likely i'll get that back up in
Speaker: the next 24 hours but it's been down for a few days now the map is a little bit in a frozen state bear with us as we fix this problem i'm trying the best i can with indonesian island internet to fix it joey's making do so what's got joey yeah doing the little stressful doing it while traveling and needing to catch flights and boats and ferries and that kind of stuff and then poor internet but i'm optimistic we'll get this back on track soon It's interesting, now that we're both full-time Akiyamart, there is really no downtime. Like, for context, I have eight of my good buddies here on the island with me.
Speaker: Joey and I are bunking together in what we call the Akiyamart headquarters Mentowai office. And although we don't have to request time off for PTO, which is cool, we've been nonstop still working on this stuff, but it's also because we want to.
Speaker: It's exciting. I do find it what's quite exciting. Every decision you make, everything you do makes a difference when it's your own business you're running. All right, bad news sorted. Yep, out of the way.
Speaker: Good news. Last time we recorded, i think, a Dear Diary series, we talked a little bit about our properties, how we had not made a single dollar, Happy to share that we have earned a few dollars. Yeah. Crowd goes wild. Crowd goes wild. We've started this. We started this process mid 2023, let's say just to round up.
Speaker: Now it's May 2025. twenty twenty five So yeah, about two years. We made our first true dollar, I believe, about a month ago. Wait, have we received any money yet? Or this is money that's promised to us? True, actually. We have not received a single dollar still.
Speaker: But we have tenants. We have people staying at these places that are going to pay us, I believe. We're jumping the gun just a smidge. But have got tenants in three of our properties. Not just one. When it rains, it pours.
Speaker: Let's start off with Tama Base Camp, so our Tokyo property. We have a tenant. i used to work at a company called Kraken. One of the Slack channels is like a digital nomads channel. I was like, hey, does anyone want to rent our Tama Base Camp?
Speaker: And lo and behold, we had someone stay. Yeah, so this first guest we have, he's got a family, and the house is big enough for a family like that. It's on outskirts of Tokyo. Got a car, so that's the perfect setup for that house, I believe. And this guy works...
Speaker: remotely, it can work from anywhere on the planet. I think it works out well. We got that office set up. I was a little nervous, but he said we smashed it out the park. He really enjoys it. He hasn't been there when it's the full-blown summer yet, though. All Joey, what's next up?
Speaker: Next up is Kitakyushu. We don't talk about Kitakyushu that much. Maybe our least liked property of the bunch, unfortunately. Sorry to everybody that likes Kitakyushu. out there. I know we kind of rag on it a lot. But anyways, the good news about the Kitakyushu property is we found a long-term tenant. So we have been trying for a long time to get a renter in there.
Speaker: We're not expecting too much money out of this. It's a lot more just for the experience of it. I know Shu Matsuo, that's a lot of what he does with his business and other people we've met in the space.
Speaker: We finally got our first long-term tenant as well. paying a whopping just under some mon en so 30 000 yen i believe it's actually 29 000 yen a month which is about 200 bucks for this is what a three bedroom it's quite a large house actually We actually and initially called this property KK20 because we were hoping to get 20% return on it.
Speaker: Just some rough back of napkin numbers. We bought this for about $3,500. thirty five hundred dollars Long story, but when someone approached us, he disappeared for a while, promised us it would be a lot easier. We did some basic renovations. We use the Japanese realtors to find a renter here.
Speaker: I haven't done the math, but I think we're pretty actually from an ROI perspective, somewhere close to the 20%. Yeah. I mean, it's it's like, yeah, 20%. Maybe we're quite close to that. It's small stakes though. you're making We're making 200 bucks a month rent. And this guy's whole strategy was like, you stack these properties. So you get up, you buy it for cheap, renovate for cheap, get a cheap tenant in there.
Speaker: You're making 20%. And if you have 10 or 20, or this guy claims to have a thousand, then you do make some money. It's a volume play. It's really interesting too, that we also listed this on Aki Markets. We're like, maybe we'll just, let's just sell it.
Speaker: And like this past week, we've had like maybe five or six people reach out to want to buy the property. And I'm like, where the F were you guys? A month ago when we were looking for a tenant, hopefully there's no issues at this point with KK20, our key to Q shoe properties. They're very happy about that. Congratulations, Joey. Thank you.
Speaker: We did... recently in the past few days, toss around the idea of, do we also sell the Kitakushu property the tenant with the tenant? Not a bad idea. If someone's just looking for ah ready to go investment rental property, that that's a potential idea that we've been thinking about. So if you're interested, let us know. Okay.
Speaker: Soji Lux, our Bepu property. We have one of our buddies who is helping us with the website. He's helping us with some growth marketing stuff. He has been renting our spot in Bepu for a little bit of time.
Speaker: ah So he's tenant number one. So good. He's helping support us. So Brian, shout out to you if you're listening to this. The spiciest thing about Bepu is we have Sato-san back in the picture. Oh, forgot about that. can't believe Sato-san's back in play. He's back, baby. He left us two notes.
Speaker: I wish I had it in front of us here. I don't have my phone on me. But the long story short is he left them inside the house. So two handwritten notes. He still has a key to the house, right? Because if people remember, he disappeared. So he was doing work, renovating our property. And then he went missing maybe in November, December.
Speaker: He's been gone for so long, we just thought that he was gone for good. The day I left Canada to come on this trip, Fumi sends us a message with two pictures of these letters, handwritten letters, and they're crazy.
Speaker: All right. I just ran and got my phone here because this is important. Before you read it, I just want to mention the one thing is that it's interesting that he left them inside, like not in our mailbox. He opened our door he has our key and left them in the like a living room or the staircase inside. So whether he meant it or not, a little bit of a flex on his part, like, hey, I still have the keys to the house, guys. we And you owe me money. We got change. We got Okay. So Taka is going to read the notes.
Speaker: Dear Joey-san, thank you very much for your assistance in the renovation project. We apologize for any inconvenience caused. My cell phone has been out of service since last December. My deepest apologies.
Speaker: Are there any defects in the construction? I am unable to visit your property at this time because I am stuck in a situation where I can't move, so I can't get the money for the construction work.
Speaker: Please! Exclamation mark. Follow-up letter. Banks are not available. Don't let them know it's cash. Can you mail it to me like a document? Please! exclamation mark Then his address.
Speaker: We've been literally trying to pay this guy, though. And I guess maybe his cell phone's dead, but we came back. in February because we're like, hey, we're ready to pay you. Come and see the place. It wasn't great. He left a lot of stuff broken, i would say. There was a pipe outside, like a water pipe that was leaking. Anyway, so now we're working with Mizoto-san, and Mizoto-san is doing about $3,000 worth of plumbing repairs to fix some of the things Sato-san.
Speaker: He either did very poorly or outright broken, like the pipe outside. And we owe Sato-san about $9,000. Is it fair to knock off $3,000 from Sato-san's?
Speaker: Dude, absolutely. Like, we've we've literally been trying to throw money at this guy and be like, hey, let's just finish it. I don't feel comfortable mailing him cash like this because we this is a business expense. It might even illegal to mail bills like that. I'm not sure, but I feel like there there might be some sort of issues there.
Speaker: Okay, I gotta wait for drama's back. Sato-san has our key. He wants money. He's uncontactable by cell. He cannot move. Address was Oita, so... We know where he lives, but I think we just pay this guy and get it done with, but like paying in cash is not correct.
Speaker: I almost don't want to nickel and dime him with the $3,000 that we're paying Mizoto-san just to get rid of Sato-san at this point and clean break. Yeah, clean break. He's got shit going on, but at this point, let's figure out a way to to close this chapter with Sato-san.
Speaker: As mentioned, Mizoto-san, new contractor, is helping us out. And mostly right now we're just fixing a bunch of plumbing issues. Moral of the story, do not expect construction to go fast in Japan, especially if you're doing this remotely. We've done a lot of podcasts on this, but just a reminder, like you think contractors in Japan are going to be a lot better than they are in the States?
Speaker: Not necessarily. We're different level of deceptiveness and trickery a little bit, but overall we're getting there two years later. Let's move on. Two more properties or three more properties. Maybe ah we have our Miyoko property.
Speaker: This one is in a stalemate or hasn't moved around, but we've been exploring Demolishing it and putting a new build, one of our podcast lists, there's shout out, you know who you are, is going to be investing with us on maybe putting a new build in with a company called Sekisui Chemical, who we've been in talks with.
Speaker: Joey, how's it been dealing with Sekisui Chemical and our cabin design in Miyoko? Just going to be honest here, I feel that Sekisui Chemical... has a very can't do attitude.
Speaker: We're paying somebody a lot of money to build us a brand new house and just like everything that we get excited about, whether it's a wood stove or a garage or just like a nice layout with big windows because of all the nice cedar trees in the backyard or like the exterior, a certain kind of exterior cladding.
Speaker: Everything has been a no with them. Really nice guys and I think they are very good at what they do, but it's just not the right fit for a foreigner appetite. but We've asked some pretty, what we think are basic things that they can't do. Their specialty is the prefab homes and think that's what they're very good at. Prefab homes doing it very Japanese style.
Speaker: As soon as we want like higher ceilings or a garage or stuff like that, it just gets really... bit crazy, huh? Unfortunately, but as a foreigner, when you're walking around like a residential neighborhood in Japan, the type of buildings that I feel like foreigners look at and they're like, oh, that's a nice house. Generally kind of older, more Japanese-y looking.
Speaker: And then when you see a house where you're like, this house is ugly, those are the type of buildings they build. I feel like from the foreigner perspective, not a nice looking house. Yep. So I think at this point we're going to powwow with our investor here and see if we maybe just work with an architect. it might take longer, but I feel like if we're putting this much time and energy and money into it, we should come out with something that's really good.
Speaker: Last negative thing. I'm just trying to be honest here. i really do feel that Sekisui Chemical and probably these other large home builders in Japan, they really don't understand what foreigners want or the type of service that a foreigner expects. It's just been so much back and forth and them asking for meetings and us feeling like they really don't understand. what like Recently we've been asking them for a garage and it's just so many back and forth with them trying to get us on a video call and then they're sending us like big zip files with lots of 3D models and then no garage in the whole thing and I just feel like it's really i called it incompetence but that's not correct I feel like this is actually highly competent from a Japanese domestic consumer perspective but for what we're looking for and because it does seem like we're trying to go out a little bit outside the norm for what they normally do it seems like incompetence
Speaker: So going to be good cop here. They've been trying really hard. It's just a disconnect on what they're used to and what we want. Yeah. I think we're trying to help them bridge the gap, but selfishly, we just need to get this house done before the ski season and the snow comes. So we are maybe looking at a different direction coming soon.
Speaker: Okay. The final official property, Nagasaki house, Aigawa. Whoa, Joey, what a freaking week it has been since we posted this.
Speaker: Yeah, this has been quite a fun side quest for us. A little bit slow. So this started February. We went to go see the house, filmed some video, marketing. All along, the idea was to see if we could create a like a seal of approval product, the Acumart seal of approval. So we wanted to put our own name on the line here and find a property that we think is a good one but basically after doing so many consultations purchasing so many properties ourselves and seeing so many deals we think we know a little bit about what would really tee up a property and make it the easiest entry into property buying in japan and so that's what we try to do with nagasaki and the journey started in february think may 8th we posted this on akia mart we tried something a little bit different we used kind of a masthead
Speaker: We did a pop-up modal. Sorry if that was annoying for you folks, but we just wanted to try. This is our website. It's cool that we had the creativity to do this. and We launched a real marketing campaign. Real marketing. We sent it on every single channel we had. The applicants flooded, and we have a total of about, I think, 103 official applicants that want to buy the house in Nagasaki.
Speaker: Thank you.
Speaker: I don't have the air horns on. And that was, it wasn't even up for that long. That was a week. Literally before actually we we posted everything, Joey and were like, damn man, are we going to be able to sell this?
Speaker: For the listeners out there, we played around with some different numbers. So all in, we spent about 16, round up to $17,000 in terms of purchasing the property, including the car, closing costs, et cetera.
Speaker: filming the video. So all we wanted to track our numbers really well. and that's what I did. I've got a spreadsheet and we're all in let's round up to about $17,000. And we toss around a lot of different numbers, but it for what we would sell it for. And in the end, we decided to go with quite an honest price tag.
Speaker: We weren't sure if anybody would even be interested in this. It was a experiment for us. So we really brought it down to $20,000. We're selling it for so me and Take are only making $3,000 of this. Okay. Not quite worth our time and effort, but it's an experiment. Yeah, whoever gets this deal, you're really getting a good deal here.
Speaker: After taxes, we're also going to learn corporate tax in Japan, what that's going to be. like We got to taxes on that profit. We spent a lot of time on this too, but either way, we are now going through the process of figuring out who the best fit is. We had a lot of positive and negative reactions. although got a lot of like emails for like, you goddamn...
Speaker: colonizers. like come on dudes like We're literally having the granddaughter choose who the next owner is. They approached us. like Anyways, we also got a lot of positive feedback. So this is our first pilot Akiyamart seal approval. We're really excited that this took off as it did.
Speaker: And we are going to be finding a buyer and helping them close pretty soon. Yeah, first seal of approval, smashed of the park. Me and Joey could not have been more happy with how it was received. We're also channeling how do we direct eyeballs to certain listings. So we had, I think, 20,000 views or something like that. Really, really happy how it turned out. So first seal of approval is going to lead Joey to our next property, Akia number six.
Speaker: since we started this journey take has been saying the paper clip to ferrari story if anyone's not familiar some guy early days of the internet started with paperclip and eventually i think traded it you know next he got a stapler and then he traded the stapler for walkman and then traded the walkman for a old laptop so on traded his way up eventually to a house I remember hearing about that way back and that was a cool story. So Taki has been talking about that. Can we paperclip to Ferrari with these homes that we're buying here? So we don't really have a goal in mind, but it is interesting to see these deals. And the next step that we have in mind is a place in Otaru.
Speaker: Yeah, let's talk. Let's hear about it A lot of our data has been showing that Otaru up in Hokkaido is like a very popular area. Specifically around the winter time, there's a lot of Aussies. You guys know who you are So looking at this area Otaru, Otaru is like a seaside bay town to my understanding. Never been there.
Speaker: About an hour away from Niseko. Still has very good skiing and snowboarding. we We are currently helping a couple customers buy there. So what happened is as we were helping these customers buy, we were and interacting with a seller's agent who was like, Hey, are you guys interested in this off market deal?
Speaker: And we're like, Ooh, tell us more. We're actually going to be doing this, working with this, going in on this deal with our agent, Yo. So our plan with this property, it's a very interesting property in that it's like a duplex almost. It's got two separate entrances, the first floor, second floor, and actually a garage.
Speaker: We have six parking spots, Joey. car I didn't even know about the garage. Yeah, or the six parking spots. But yeah the parking at all of our places is really bad. It's hard to park in all the homes we've bought so far.
Speaker: But yeah, this Otaru spot looks like easy parking, space for six cars, two units upstairs and downstairs. I think that there's so many possibilities with the double units. You and a friend could each have your own unit or you could have your own personal space and then turn the other one into an Airbnb.
Speaker: You could have your own personal space and then use the other one for a home office. And with the idea of getting some sort of business manager visa or employee visa, which requires a physical office. So there's lots of really good ideas that can come from having that second unit. The property itself, just a couple details off the top of my head. I think it's built in the 80s, about 200 square meters. It's a very big property, like technically three floors. Bottom floor is like a garage, second floor is Floor, like two bedrooms, I believe in a bathroom and a kitchen. And then the third floor is identical and there's a separate entrance that goes directly up, but we are moving forward.
Speaker: We need to actually close on Nagasaki house to fund this property, but going little bit paperclip to Ferrari. So any listeners, we actually haven't closed on yet, but coming soon.
Speaker: Number two, Aki Mart seal of approval. We are going to get this Otaru house. We're going to set it up with a car. We are going to set it up with a Minpaku license or Airbnb license. So it's ready to go. yeah Utilities.
Speaker: BIO is going to be the operator. So you can actually buy this investment ready to go to pretty much day one, be an Airbnb. You could live on the top floor. You could live in the middle floor. You can not Airbnb it. There's a lot of options here and we're really excited about this. a little bit of a different property than what we're used to.
Speaker: I think what's exciting about this property is Otaku close to skiing, close to Sapporo, and also the whole Airbnb aspect of it, having those two units. So that sounds interesting to you. Keep your eyes peeled.
Speaker: I remember something you told me, Take, way back. I think maybe even before we had got the keys for the Beppu house, J-Lux. You were like, all right, because you had purchased property before in the U.S. You were like, it's going to feel like you're spending a lot of money very quickly. We are.
Speaker: And I feel running a business has been a lot like that too. Maybe not so much spending a lot of money. it is that as well, but things move very quickly. like Momentum based. Yeah. It's going to feel like things are moving very quickly. It has, but.
Speaker: Scared money don't make money. That's what they say. Holy crap. We're recording this in May 2025. Again, at the bachelor party in Indonesia. We're looking out on ah beautiful ocean, staying at a nice resort kind of thing.
Speaker: Taking a little bit of break, but Joey Chastitam, cheers. come buy We have purchased six properties. and We want to thank the listeners at this point. I think we have like close to maybe 500 to 1,000 listeners. So thank you for listening to our journey.
Speaker: It has not been easy. We have not made a ton of money, just to be very honest, but it's been a lot of fun. I don't know any other crazy bastards like us who have bought in six very different locations in Japan.
Speaker: Something we discussed before was our Tama house, like we were just saying. We did get a tenant and hopefully we have some money owed to us. haven't received it yet, but I think we're likely to sell that yeah as well this year.
Speaker: That could be our third seal of approval property. So that's one prediction I have. Maybe even Kitakushu. Maybe somebody wants a tenanted property. Kitakushu's making us money now, though, which is interesting. Let's enjoy it for a second here.
Speaker: Thank you guys all for listening. If you are interested, and just to plug here, we're changing things up with like how we help people purchase at the top of funnel. We're starting to do free webinars. We recognize that lot of people are just interested in some information, not quite ready to pay money. Originally, we did the paid consultations because we just had so many weird consultations of people who've never been to Japan who just want a free house.
Speaker: And a lot of flakes when it was free as well. Taki and I are. taking time out of our day to get on these consultations and people would flake. But yeah, I think the free webinar long-term makes the most sense. We've also onboarded Eric. You maybe have listened to a podcast with him. He's one of our first AkiMart Direct customers now.
Speaker: Good friend. We're working with him and also his buddy, Jay. You might not be able to book directly with us, but please still reach out to us at contact.akiamart.com. We're happy to talk to you a little bit.
Speaker: And um yeah, I think onwards and upwards, Joey. Onwards and upwards. All right. Let's get it.
Speaker: Thanks for listening to this week's episode of Buying a House in Japan. If you find the show helpful or at least entertaining, give us a five-star rating. Takes five seconds and really goes a long way. If you or someone you know is looking for a Japanese home, check out Akiyamart.com, our English-friendly site that lets you browse over half a million listings. That's A-K-I-Y-A-M-A-R-T.com to find your dream home in Japan.
Speaker: If you've got questions or feedback, drop us a line, email contact at akiamart.com. You can also find us on Instagram as well as TikTok, where we post properties, tips on the home buying process, and updates on our own purchases and renovations.
Speaker: Thanks again for listening and we'll see you next week.
