Transcript
Speaker: you ever watch The Office where they have, do you watch The Office or no? Yeah, I've seen it. I haven't seen the British one, the American You know when Ryan has, he goes with woof.com and he sends it to everything. Like you click a button and it sends your fax machine, sends your social media, texts all your friends.
Speaker: Woof.com. That's what we're doing with Nagasaki House. We're sending a woof. Yep.
Speaker: Welcome back to the buying a house in Japan podcast. How you doing, Joey? I'm doing good. Do you smell that, Take? What? Is that a bonus episode we have of buying house in Japan? is indeed a bonus episode. Today we are talking about our Nagasaki property that we are putting up for sale.
Speaker: We've been talking about this property, I think probably for the past two months, we called it Nagasaki Crypto House. We've, I don't know what else we've called it, but we are now just going to straight up call it Nagasaki House.
Speaker: I forgot about the crypto part long time ago. We decided to try to sell this for Bitcoin, but we shelved that plan maybe next year. We'll try that again. But for now, we are interested in the seller side of operations. And throughout this journey, Taki and I have seen about 40 to 50 deals so far. We've helped people purchase in Japan with another 40 up and coming. And we've seen a lot of friction coming from the seller side. So this is our attempt to be the seller ourselves and alleviate So many of those obstacles.
Speaker: We're calling this our first Akiya Mart seal of approval property in which we are trying to really tee this up for someone who's interested in entering the market. Joey, what do we have included in this deal?
Speaker: First off, property, we are pricing it at $20,000 What?
Speaker: And not only does it come with a house in addition for that $20,000, we're throwing in our very own 2010 Honda life K car. Yes. It's coming with a property. Yes. It's coming with a parking spot.
Speaker: This house is 30 seconds walk from the beach. Uh, we're teeing it up with the building inspection report already done. Utilities already turned on. That one's a big one, a Taki, because so many of you who have purchased in Japan or have been looking at it, you know, that it's difficult, dare I say impossible to get a Japanese bank account. So you need some help getting utilities set up.
Speaker: This property is coming with it already turned on. We also have made connections with a bilingual property manager down in the area. So really whoever is buying this is going to be just set up for success. I'd like to say, again, the property we vetted, we've taught, you maybe have heard our podcast with Mika, but this property has been well loved.
Speaker: Nothing crazy has happened here. It's well maintained. It's our newest property we've bought at built in 1988. You really, it's a good deal. I say we usually, our first deal is going to be a B when you buy your first Aki, but I really do think this is an A. 25 minute drive to downtown Nagasaki to the proximity. So this property is in a little coastal town.
Speaker: along the Nagasaki coast. It's got a beach right in the town, but the town itself is only a 25 minute drive from downtown Nagasaki. And that's a real city. Taki and I spent about three or four days there this past winter. It's got everything you need in Nagasaki. I don't know the population, but two million people, who knows?
Speaker: Yeah. Nagasaki is awesome. The house, look at the videos. we've We're about to blast like a ton of content out. So watch the videos. It's very, again, crystal clear waters, very nice, quiet town.
Speaker: I would really live here. If I was a digital nomad and I wanted to get out of the US and just wanted somewhere quiet in Japan where I could live life, I think this is a pretty good option. Low cost of living, immediately livable.
Speaker: Mika's aunt was living here up but until the day they handed the keys over. So everything is functional and pretty well maintained. Dare I say this is probably the easiest way to get started with property in Japan. Taki and I have learned so much over the past two years and we really went out of our way to try to eliminate all those obstacles. If you're looking for the real handheld solution here, I would say this is it.
Speaker: And we will also waive our AkiMart direct fee. So we will be able to help you purchase this all remotely, all in English, very confident because we are the sellers. We will be able to work with you and be quite quick and transparent.
Speaker: and so maybe one of yeah That's a big one too. No buyer's advocate fee. That's almost unheard of in the Japanese property market for foreigners. That's true. Yeah. People are probably asking, do I need to renovate this? Joey, what are your thoughts? What is the condition of the house?
Speaker: Yeah, great question. i would do a light renovation. I think that tatami mats, so maybe similar to our Kitekushu property where we just resurface the tatami mats. You can go out, it you can buy new tatami mats too. Actually, they're quite affordable, but the at least a resurfacing, I would say, where you put a new out exterior cover on the tatami mats.
Speaker: I would also say that the kitchen needs a little bit of love. It is a small kitchen, but maybe fresh wallpaper on the walls in there. After that, I think that same sort of process would work in most of the rooms new to Tommy Madison fresh wallpaper, and that would take you quite far.
Speaker: There is a big storage shed as well. Keep your tools and stuff in there. Yep. I'd say also the utilities wise, we've already set this up with Mailmate, our friend, John Cross, we've recorded a podcast with him. So When you do buy this, we'd transfer the utilities into your name. You would be subscribed to John Cross's services, which have been awesome thus far, digital mailbox, stuff like that. So you can do all your utilities via credit card online. I think we're ready to go with this. We are blasting this on every channel. It's been fun as business owners that we can really...
Speaker: hack our way and do what we want here. So we are planning to push the YouTube video, do this podcast, send out our newsletter with all our members to show that we're selling this property.
Speaker: Joey's been working really hard on the listing page. Joey doesn't love it, but we're doing a lot of hacky things. What are you working on with the, how are we promoting this on AkiumArt? Yeah, from a software engineering standpoint, a lot of hacky things. So trying to limit that where we can, but very specific buttons and formatting on the listing page for this property. So got to go in there and do some hacky changes for this specific listing. But other than that, it's not too hacky. pop-up modal, we're putting on this a first for us, some sort of a pop-up thing that pops up when you come to our website. We haven't done that yet.
Speaker: And then also if people are interested, but clicked out of the pop-up modal, as most everybody does, myself included, we'll have a very small banner image on our landing page as well. If you popped out, you clicked out of the modal, but maybe in a little bit of time, you want to come back and actually check out the listing.
Speaker: Listeners who are Akiyamart users, please give us feedback. We know we're trying something new here, but it's cool. This is our first forlay really into buying and selling homes. Again, we've learned a lot about buying. Now it's time to learn on the selling side.
Speaker: One last thing that we mentioned at the start but didn't maybe get enough attention is we do have somebody on the ground that can help you, an English-speaking person local to the area. So when you're not in town, I know Taki and I have mentioned Fumi.
Speaker: and Linda quite often on this podcast and how invaluable they've been along our journey. So often we need a package delivered and we're not there and Japanese Amazon delivery people, very unlikely they'll just leave the package unattended. So someone that can pick up packages for you or someone to, let's say someone needs to be at the house because you have a contractor coming to give you a quote for some work, but you're living remotely. Having someone on the ground that speaks English, that is willing to help you out with odd tasks here and there. It's one of the biggest learnings that me and Take have discovered over this course of buying property in Japan remotely, but also trying to manage them remotely. So we are hooking this property up with someone that we've already found pre-vetted. had lunch with once before. do think that, yeah, speaks good English. So I do think that is maybe for first time buyers, not something you would readily think of, but really has been quite valuable for us. And we're hooking the property up with that with that as well.
Speaker: We think we really set this price point to sell. We really are not making that much money from this. We spent a lot of time and a lot of money on marketing and just getting all this stuff up. This is really, again, we're trying to get the experience here.
Speaker: With that, we do expect a lot of people are going to be interested at this price point. Again, $20,000. After all, fees with the buying agent's commission and the Shiho Shoshi transfer fees, we're expecting to be around closer to $26,000, which i think a pretty freaking killer deal that includes the car that has things already set up.
Speaker: One thing we're adding in here is we're going to create a deadline channeling a little bit of FOMO, but we also want to sell this fast. So we're putting an application process in. So once you go to the Aki Mart listing, it'll bring you to an optional Notion page, which will have a lot of breakdown of the information, the building inspection, stuff like that.
Speaker: And then let's say you are, and if you are interested in buying, we're going to have you submit an application form. The reason we're doing this is let's say we do get a couple people interested. We want to let Mika and Mika's family choose who lives here. And I think this is a really cool thing in that we're not just pawning this off to the first buyer, but we want to make sure that whoever comes into this house is going to do good for the community. And Mika and their family are going to be happy. They've owned this house for how long did they say? 100, 200 years. We want to make sure they feel good with the next seller or next buyer.
Speaker: They own the property, but the house was built in the eighties, I think, but did they own the previous house that was there beforehand as well. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's really interesting, Takei, when you first mentioned that idea. And I do think that that's probably the right way to go about selling this property as well, given how long Mika's family has been in that neighborhood. I think giving them a say in who takes over ownership next is a great idea.
Speaker: All right, Joey. I think we've pretty much explained it. I think this is a really good opportunity. I'm not just saying that because it's ours and we want to sell it, but had we got this as our first property instead of our Beppu property, which we paid about $40,000 for, this is really such an easy mode button for someone who wants to buy and isn't doesn't want all the work and friction that we experienced in purchasing a property.
Speaker: Yeah, no freak out. remember when we first got to Beppu, sorry, Ziv helped us buy our first Beppu house and we got there and the water wasn't running or something like that. And I'm frantically texting him. We're avoiding that whole situation with the utilities as well. Yeah. Learn learn from our mistakes and we're hoping to give whoever takes over this property next the easiest and smoothest process.
Speaker: Okay. Our first rep is in motion, Joey. I'm excited to start helping people sell houses. If you are listening to this, we have actually had a couple people reach out who want us to help their sell their grandma's houses. So this is going to be a case study number one. I really hope we can do this.
Speaker: Worst case though, it'd be cool to keep. I'm not going to be super sad if we keep this property. Again, it's by the coast. It's beautiful. And I think it has a lot of potential. Yeah. Great summer home.
Speaker: All right. See you on the flip side. We're excited. You'll see this on the listing site soon, and you'll hear from us guaranteed. We're going to try to leverage every channel we have and see if we can get word out on the street about this listing.
