Transcript
Speaker: Welcome back. Boom, boom, boom. Another episode of Buying House in Japan. I'm your host, Joey Stockerman, and joined with my co -host, Takei. Hey, thanks for the coffee beans from Glitch, Joey. These coffee beans are lit. Like, they're so good. What kind of, beat yeah, it's like, is this coffee or is this juice? Glitch, my brother told me about Glitch. I don't know how he knew about it.
Speaker: But it's this coffee shop in Ginza and the beans are crazy. Like they have, it says like bubblegum, strawberry, and you know how many different coffee brands they'll rate all these different flavor profiles in the beans. This is the first time I, I smelt it. Like I smelt bubblegum, I smelt strawberry, like cantaloupe, like everything they put on it, all very kind of fruity flavors. And it really, it comes out in the flavor as well.
Speaker: Did you get me? Okay. straw smell This smells like strawberry, the whatever beans you got me, like Columbia or something. remember the Wow. How do they do this? I don't understand. I don't know. Pretty good. Anybody traveling to Tokyo, check out Glitch in Ginza. It was nice free wifi too. Okay. There's also a good Maguro Don spot somewhere nearby across the street or something. How much were these beans? Like it was like maybe like 50 grams or something like that. So it's a tiny bag, right? It's maybe four or five cups worth. Yep. Worth of beans. It was like, I want to say 4 ,000 yen. Okay. A bag.
Speaker: Kind of good gift though. Good like novelty. like This is such a different coffee bean than I've ever had before. So thanks for the present. It's a gift that keeps on giving. Yeah. i like If I had to guess, it's kind of like you know if you go to a coffee shop and you you go to an expensive coffee shop and it's like $9 for a cup of coffee. This is a make it at home coffee, but it's $9 making it at home. Yeah.
Speaker: but All right, Joey, I got some hot topics for you today. We want to talk a little bit about Aki and Mart upgrades. I think we've had a lot of folks reach out and being like, Hey, can we get this filter and this filter and this feature? So wanted to just get ahead of it and address some of the big things we're working on. As a reminder, we are a two person team and Joey is the only technical person on the team. So Joey, thank you o sky to for building the site from scratch and handling all these technical troubleshooting things people have been asking. One man army.
Speaker: One man. It's actually completely different for any software engineers listening. It's completely different writing code for yourself versus writing it at a company. Even the boring parts are way less boring. And even the on call aspect of it is, you know, feels, it doesn't feel like on call work. It feels more like, I don't know, gardening or something like that. You have a pest in your garden and you need to deal with it. Did we ever figure out what happened to the mole and our in Tokyo Tama base camp?
Speaker: I don't know if that's a mole. What? What is it? The turd was too big. for but The turd itself was the size of a mole. i think I have no idea. I think this is what I think. I think there is a mole and I think that was a cat turd. Okay. All right. So a couple of features we have coming on. Again, just for anyone listening, we really Joey made the site back in last May. Is that right? It's like a prototype for ourselves. Yeah, it was the first commit to the repo. Yep. And we officially launched it it in January. So it's really been about eight to nine months of us being live. And again,
Speaker: There's like a bajillion things we want to build, but with limited resources. So we're stacking a couple things. From a business perspective, this is you know our livelihood a little bit. We're trying to make this a business. So trying to optimize a little bit for a little bit of like what's going to help us keep afloat, but also what provides the most utility. So I think at the very top of it, Joey, we did a big SEO project. Talk to me a little bit about ah SEO.
Speaker: I was just going to mention that probably users of the website have noticed that there hasn't been many changes in the past two or three months. Most of that one was I was in Tokyo dealing with a lot of sort of admin related stuff, but also I was focused on SEO work. So stuff that goes on behind the scenes.
Speaker: in a business that users of a website don't ever notice or ever come across. So that's really building out specific pages on the website that Google bots and other search engine bots love and are easy for them to to read the data on and categorize so that you can rank higher in a Google search. So things we're working on with building pages to rank high if someone were to search for Akiya Nagoya or Akiya Shimoda or Atami or something like that. Yep. So we were so finding that if we were to search Akiya, we were typically on page two now at time of recording Joey. Congratulations. We are on spot number two. Pretty good. Yay. All right.
Speaker: Yeah, it's really SEO is interesting, right? So ah users of the website, they, they'll never see these pages. They probably, maybe they have a bookmark or they type in Aki Martin, the search bar of Google Chrome and it pops right up. But it's really building a set of pages for robots is the work. So I apologize to people. I was building busy building pages for robots, not for our actual human users over the past two or three months, but that's where the ball of the time spent was.
Speaker: Dolly, and shout out to my buddy who I used to skate with, Brian Randy Ta, who's been doing a little consultation work for us. it's been He's been a wizard and has set us on the right path. And he's motivated us that we can compete with the big boys, right, Joey?
Speaker: ah yeah Yeah, I think that he did seem to mention that and even some of the big boys don't do proper SEO. Like I don't think these Japanese real estate websites are doing proper SEO either. so And it really takes a large restructuring of your pages just to get a tiny bit technical for one second. You need to start doing a lot of server side rendering. It's basically just a way of getting the information to the bot faster and the Google bots like getting the information faster instead of slower.
Speaker: So yeah, I do think that you can, if you put, if you're a smaller company and you take in some core principle SEO strategies, I do also agree that I think you can take on the big dogs because they're likely too big and it'll take too much time and money and manpower to change their website to something like service side rendering, for example. So.
Speaker: Smaller scrappier, you can do it. Next up, I think this is a hot feature that I've been wanting and asking Joey a lot about. you know On Zillow, you can you typically see previously sold. I think that helps users understand like How much did this house here sell for? I'm buying the house next to it. I want to figure out those comps. So challenging thing in Japan is they don't track sales data. So there's not like one unified place. Like there is MLS in the u United States where you can see how much that house next to you sold for. So we're doing something a little bit different. I know Joey's been collecting the data, but Joe, you want to talk a little bit about CDN actually specifically on a storing images too.
Speaker: Yep. So Tuck is right. Excuse me. There's no central database for us to figure out the price that a property sold at. We're looking into it. There's a few kind of random websites here and there, but I believe that, you know, it's like the ah standard way Japanese websites.
Speaker: give users the data, which is in PDF format, like a non -parseable PDF format. So there's, there's difficulties in getting that information and it might not even exist. We're still trying to figure out if that is possible or not. But yeah, so on the one hand, we can't track when a property was sold using some sort of source of truth. So we do the best we can. What does that mean? Our scrapers, they look to see when a listing is no longer up. So what we do is we ping all these listings every day. And if we get a, if we get the the website back, the listing page back, we know that it's up and we can parse the information that's on the webpage, but Japanese websites, they take the listings down. Yeah.
Speaker: when something sells. And that's part of the nature of their business is that real estate agents pay these Japanese websites to list on them. So as soon as they stop paying at home, Sumo, et cetera, these other websites, they'll take the listing down. So that's how we know when something was sold or not. You know, it's a best guess, but when we get 404 back for a specific listing, we make the assumption that it was sold. But one of the implications of this business model that these Japanese websites run where they take the listing down when something's sold, is they also delete the images that they've stored for that listing as well. So their images are stored somewhere out in the cloud kind of thing and it appears that they delete those images when the listing is taken down. So when we link Hotlink to those images for listings that have had their original Japanese listing taken down, those image links, those Hotlinks no longer resolve into an actual image. so We've been trying to figure out a way to solve this so if you were to look at a historical listing on a key mark you can still see the images the grand idea would be. To be able to search through properties that actually were sold and see all the data and all the images for historical listings as well so that's kind of the problem and yeah we've been going about it.
Speaker: And mainly we've just started storing the images ourselves. So that's the main way of doing it. I've never done this kind of thing before. So it has been a learning experience for me and going about it slowly, you know, storing a lot of images costs, costs more and more money, the more you store. So trying to be go slow strategic. Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: yeah And I think another thing too, if you're looking at an Akiemara listing and just know it's going to be sold, this has happened to us actually for both our Beppu property and our Tokyo property. The property gets delisted and I'm sad. I forget to save the images. So if you're looking at a property right now, like save the images, they will be gone. I know a couple of folks that were helping through the process right now. I'm going to tell them the same thing because it's, I kind of miss looking at the listing. I've looked at it like a hundred times and then it's gone like, Oh man, it's a,
Speaker: So store those listings, but hopefully soon we'll have those images saved. But it's a shit ton of images, right? Yeah, I would say in about three months, you know, again, going about this slow, it is a lot of images. I would expect in about three months time, you can be pretty safe that the we'll be able we would have stored the images. But for now, if there is a listing you really want to keep the the images of, yeah, store them yourself.
Speaker: And this these saved guys images and previously sold. We hope that this actually segues into our next improvement. We are looking at doing it something similar to its estimate. Again, we don't have the sales data that we have, let's say here in the States, but using our methodology of the last price it was listed at, we assume it was sold. I think over time, this will give us a lot of really clean structured data on like giving estimates of like, Hey, a couple houses in this area of the same size.
Speaker: sold at this price. you know I think over time this will help build that model. We actually have two of ah Joey's University of Cambridge PhD data science friends may be helping us out here. Is there anything on this one?
Speaker: ah Yeah. Well, so just, yeah, it was a segue from the images, but we don't actually need the images, ah build something like as estimate. So we do keep all historical data. It's just been the images that we've been hot linking to and not storing ourselves. So that was the issue, but yeah, definitely building some sort of as estimate model or, you know, getting a little bit more sophisticated with our data analysis. So as estimate model would be.
Speaker: the ability to get a price estimate for any given address in Japan. Some other kind of data science type projects would be something like finding similar properties, so finding comps. Here's a property, you know, here's some you go to a listing and maybe it can recommend you other properties that are very similar to that one as well. Yeah.
Speaker: Yep. So I think those are some big things, a big things to chew off, but I do feel like it will disrupt the Japanese real estate space once we get them. Joey moving on now, next feature that I know you've been working on, something I've been requesting for is zoning maps or hazard maps. What's that looking like?
Speaker: I found the gold mine here. There's a Japanese government website that has a ton of very accurate maps stored in. And what's the geode? It's not GeoJSON, but it's some map format that can be converted into GeoJSON. And it's ultimately a GeoJSON file that we use to show different polygons and stuff on our map.
Speaker: They have so many different things they've got hazard maps they've got zoning maps zoning is important for airbnb even though there's more that goes into it than just zoning but yeah zoning is important for airbnb hazard maps what i wish i remember i haven't looked at this in a while but think i mean.
Speaker: Yeah, like landslides. Yeah, landslides. Agricultural land. So I think these maps. Schools. Schools. Interesting. Yeah, like you could they they would have a map with a location of every middle school in Japan. And you could be like, OK, well, I want a house within two, one mile of a middle school or something like that, because my kids are that age.
Speaker: Okay. Yeah, this is a, I think ah you had a beta, like I remember you had a little bit out, but this is a huge, you know, I think if from a map based perspective, it's really, really hard right now in Japanese real estate sites to know the zoning, you'd have to click into the listing and look up the zoning, maybe even call up the city office.
Speaker: with this like map overlay of what we're thinking, it becomes a lot easier of like, Hey, let's find everything in a commercial zoning that is, can get a hotel license or something like that. yeah So, and this is ah a central government website too. So I don't think that if you call your loca Shiax show city hall, I don't think that they have anything more accurate than this website either. So this was a little bit of a goldmine.
Speaker: Okay, so zoning maps, I think this is going to be a big one that will change the functionality and kind of help us level up. But there's also a lot of small things. I think we get a lot of feature requests, Joey. I'm just going to rapid fire them to you. I think one of the top ones we get is like notifications. So if I'm looking in a specific area and want to draw like a little map and get notifications there. Curious, how how big of a t -shirt size project is that, Joey?
Speaker: Yeah, I actually started this one. So this one, someone else reached out to me on LinkedIn recently, someone that I met at a dev conference in Shibuya a month and a half ago. He yeah again, got a request for this exact feature. This is something that ourselves we've wanted. Yeah. You know, there's two parts to it. There's the ability to save a search and then save a specific set of filters region of the map. And then within this price range, within this, et cetera.
Speaker: And then the ability to get notifications, an email sent to you when something new pops up that meet ah that set of filters. There's one tricky part. I'm not going to go into details. It's specific to how our map is set up in our code base, but there's one tricky aspect other than that. I don't see this as being that complicated. So I would actually give this a medium t -shirt size. Medium. Okay.
Speaker: We've also another small thing, maybe a large thing. We know that our subscription, cancel kind of process is a little clunky. So anyone listening on like, how do I cancel? if Which thank you for using AccuMart Pro, but if you do want to cancel, it's very easy. You go up to accounts, subscription and cancel. Joey and I wake up every morning with, hey, like these people are like all capital letters, cancel my account now. And we're like, oh my gosh.
Speaker: I don't love the customer service, but i we're we know we're going to try to make it a little bit more intuitive on how to look at your subscription and things like that. But for now, if you are looking to cancel, first off, send us some feedback. But also, it's very easy. Go up to account subscriptions and cancel and note it will cancel immediately. Again, something we're trying to figure out. I don't know, Joey, have we what are your thoughts here?
Speaker: i that yeah on the how it cancels you you immediately lose access to akemar pro yeah features yep that yeah so easy fix a little tricky So the issue is that when someone cancels, you know, maybe this just comes down to me. I need to learn a little bit more about Stripe. So we use Stripe to handle billing and some aspects of subscription management. And really the tricky issue with Stripe is keeping your database and whatever Stripe will be.
Speaker: Stripe's API is the source of truth and the database needs to keep up with that. And that's the tricky part, keeping your database and Stripe's database in line. And so one aspect here is when someone cancels their subscription, you're telling Stripe that their subscription is canceled. So then we have some automatic web hooks that hook into the Stripe API and when there's a change,
Speaker: to one of our customers subscription, Stripe will ping our web hook and essentially hit a specific endpoint that will cancel that person's subscription in our database. So that's all fine and good. Those two are aligned. But then what we're saying is we need to give someone access to the end of their billing period. So there's that other aspect there where there's a little bit of a discrepancy between what Stripe is saying, what a database is saying, and then the actual access that we're giving the user. so Potentially one way of doing this is storing when the billing period ends and then keep giving them access until that period. and Maybe there's a few different ways. it'll take I guess one of the reasons why I haven't done this is that every software developer hates reading documentation and this is going to require me to go through the Skype documentation and start trying to figure out I'm sure someone else has had this issue. I'm sure there's a way to solve it. It's just been a low priority at the moment. So I just put a big disclaimer up. No worries. And I didn't understand anything you said there, Joy. and
Speaker: but If anyone of our 100 true fans knows how to solve this, please let us know. We've had a couple great people reach out to us with you know offering to help and we appreciate them. We actually had ah one person reach out with a small feature request that Joey actually implemented over like overnight. So when you now are in the list view of AcuMart with the map,
Speaker: When you hover over places, you'll see which dot it's associated to. Shout out to Andrew for that one. But yeah, I think that I hear you on the subscriptions and anyone knows everyone. It's not as easy as it's. Sorry, guys. I mean, it's it's more of a really boring a task to ahead of me. So and I thought that the disclaimer was maybe I'm being maybe I'm being lazy to.
Speaker: Anyways, what's your, what feature do you want? Absolutely the most. What's what's taught it. If you were the king of Accumart, what would you build? for king King of Accumart. Okay.
Speaker: I would say honestly, the previously sold is a really big one. you know I think we have so much data and again, we can't go back previously to when we started, but let's say 10 years from now, being able to look back on like what something was sold for, just being able to see our old house being sold at this price or being able to see what other people are have sold for a nearby, I think is a really interesting dataset.
Speaker: ah especially for active people. like For now, if we wanted to buy something in Beppu and we saw Neighbors House sold for $20 ,000, that would give us a baseline. Plus being able to see photos, i think ah you know seeing cool properties go off market kind of hurts. We had a couple of cool properties in Miyazaki that we can't look at the listing anymore. anymore We lost those photos. So that's my Takis top feature. Joey, flipping it on to you. If you were to snap your fingers right now, what would be number one feature you want just done?
Speaker: I would love the ability to, I don't know how this would actually work. Let's just say magically that all the properties on Akiemara were somehow categorized like into castle -like properties or beachfront properties or properties next to a river or you know fun categories. doesn't have to be because It doesn't have to be every single category on the planet, but I don't know, 30 fun categories i think i would like onsend properties with water. I don't know exactly how to do this, but
Speaker: I think that's a fun way to search. We talked about that, right? There's like a way to search the text. So of late we put hot spring, you know, in a search bar and pull up every one with a listing with hot spring. How do you search? Yeah. Keyword search. ah Yeah, that's doable. it's It's again, something that I don't have. There's a way to do that kind of look up quickly. and I don't have experience in it, but again, it's, I'm sure there's a YouTube video I can follow.
Speaker: Well, here's another idea that I had. This kind of goes back to 2017. I had this idea way back like when crypto for Ethereum first became a thing in the crypto world.
Speaker: I had this idea that too, so I was working for SoundCloud at the time and one of the issues SoundCloud has is that they don't know who the rights holders to a lot of tracks. So tracks that people upload because anyone can upload a track to SoundCloud. It doesn't go through like a more rigorous process like Spotify. So they wanted to figure out who owns the rights to all these different pieces of music that had been uploaded.
Speaker: And I had this idea that, well, what if you built this kind of web app kind of like Spotify or SoundCloud where people upload music and then you get users to categorize the music. So they answer one specific question about that piece of music. So the question would be like name one artist on this track or name the rights and basically you're outsourcing to humans. So maybe they have to Google the question or now you could use chat sheet or whatever, right?
Speaker: Basically you get humans to crowdsource metadata about music and if they do that and maybe there's some sort of. Checker to see it if 10 people say that it, the song is by this one artist, then it becomes like, okay, that's most likely the correct answer. This is the artist on this track.
Speaker: and people would get rewarded with tokens again i was in the excited about crypto at the time so you get rewarded with tokens and then you use those tokens to stream tracks on the the music platform so basically you can pay for your music subscription by answering metadata about the music and i was wondering if there's you know i've always had this idea in the back of my mind i wonder if we could crowdsource categorizing listings. I don't know if it's the right thing to do, but I don't know. This is just an idea I always had. No, no, I hear you. I think that'd be interesting. I think like ah for us, one of the challenges is also like getting featured properties. Like the featured properties are literally Joey and I like going through and liking properties. So we know some of them are pretty stale on the homepage. So coming through, we're going to, we're going to refresh those, but I hear you, Joey. I think that's interesting. And I think categories like Airbnb has categories and how do they do it?
Speaker: Maybe that might be something we look at. Like how do we, how does Airbnb pull like stylish properties and stuff like that? Any idea? Maybe because it's user submitted, maybe the user can fill out categories at the time that they upload it, whereas we're scraping. So can't do that. All right. Speaking of crawling slash scraping here, we know there's a lot of improvement needed on condos. We, I feel like this is probably like our number one kind of like yeah feedback.
Speaker: right We don't pull every single condo at this point. We initially made this condo section for an investment perspective. We were really looking at like, hey, are condos good investments with high yields? So we made like a gross yield feature. Joey, what are your thoughts on pulling in more condos, baking condos?
Speaker: Yeah, to just expand on the context there, if you look at any condo on AcuMart, you will see this little gross yield section. So every single condo listing has that, even if there's no data there, you'll still see that gross yield label. And that's because as Takei said, we try to kind of build something that's similar to a website called Rakumachi. If anyone else is interested in investment properties in Japan, check out Rakumachi. It's kind of the, the main.
Speaker: website people go to in Japan. We went to, so we thought, okay, a lot of people are invested in, are interested in investment condos. Let's get investment condos on the platform. This is way, but you know, this might've been February, 2024. And so that's what we did. So I found basically at home's version of Rakumachi. And that's where we're getting the data from, mostly because we were already looking at home and getting data from there. But there's some issues with this, as Taki mentioned.
Speaker: The may have may first one is that it's not all the condos. There's more condos that in Japan and all these places that we don't have because we're not scraping that data. We are scraping a subset, which is the investment condo aspect of it. So one, we have an incomplete data set there. Two, a lot of these condos, it does seem like the bulk of our customers are looking at condos as a vacation property and not as an investment. And a lot of these condos have tenants because they're part of this investment property section of the websites we're sourcing data from. So a lot of them are tenanted and the idea would be you buy this condo with an existing tenant and now you collect the rent instead of the old landlord.
Speaker: And the third, so for the second issue, third issue is that there's a lot of fees associated with condos that we don't do a good job of surfacing on our website. but I was just on a consultation last night where the fees were crazy. It was actually about a thousand a month in condo fees for this one property that this person had found. And I think that's a rare exception, but there are fees associated with it and with condos and we don't do a good job ah job of surfacing those costs.
Speaker: All right, next investment. I think we got to try to buy a condo just to learn about the process. Maybe something in Asahikawa next to a Kendall, but yeah identity and yeah, anyone that's looking at condos, just know there's additional fees that we're not pulling yet. And Joey, I think we got to,
Speaker: i know I know there's so many things on the Trello board, but this is probably one that's maybe leading people down the wrong path. And I feel like it's a constant correction we have to make with folks. But yeah, I think pulling those fees, pulling in more condos, and then adding eventually land, I think is an interesting play. I know us Americans love buying land. So there's a lot of land opportunities in Japan. So maybe that's something coming around the horizon. But again, we got enough on our plates here, right?
Speaker: Yup. Land is a little bit in like other news. We were trying to figure out a way to put people in touch with contractors in Japan and having struggling there a little bit. So if people are purchasing land, you know, it's still, we're back to that same issue of like, how do they put a house there? You know, how do they get power in a well dug kind of thing. So also some issues with selling people land, but yeah, one set up a time. I am excited about land. I think land's cool.
Speaker: yep yep sorry just cut you off one more time because i keep looking at yakshima again i've never been yakshima but i think it seems pretty close yakshima you can't buy anything there unless you have 250 ,000 us but land there does seem quite affordable So let's look this up right now. Yakushima land. So Yakushima for anyone listening, I'd say it's my favorite place in Japan. It is where they filmed Princess Mononoke or not filmed, sorry. They based Princess Mononoke off it, like the forest vibes. Pretty magical. So you can't go. and So at home, Sumo, those other websites, they don't have a lot. You have to actually Google Yakushima Fudosan.
Speaker: Let me find out, pull up the website. So Yakshima, I was there for two weeks and it's crazy. I was like biking around and see like flying fish jumping out of the water. I said, there's an onsen that touched the sea. So I was like, you get waves splashing on you, but still be in hot water. Like next to me, I'd have all these like turtles breaching out, being born out of the sand. I was like, wow, it was crazy stuff.
Speaker: Magical spot. Okay. I'm looking at land right now. hey I just sent you the link. Take it. Maybe put in show notes or something. But yeah, Nijakkuman. So 2 million yen for piece of land here. Oh, man. Okay. Actually, it was also really famous for the trees. They have this one tree. So Jomon Sugi, I think Jomon Sugi, which is yeah.
Speaker: oldest largest specimen of Cryptomira Japonica tree, but it's like this massive massive tree and It's a UNESCO World Heritage site. So Look at this. There's only one picture. Take a look at this listing and look at where it is on the map. This is like and coastline lot It looks like or at least there's just a bunch of jungle there or something for what would this be like $12 ,000 Oh, my gosh, I don't know. Like I haven't been so getting the actually was hard. You have to take a boat from Kagoshima. It's and it's a journey. But what would we do with this lot? Just like, oh, OK, this is right by the the ferry area. Pretty cool. OK. Yeah, pretty close to the ferry. I think tiny home mobile home. Maybe we hit up our buddy, Modi, who's doing prefab stuff.
Speaker: All right. we We don't have money for this. This is just the straight up. If anyone wants anyone listening, just wants to buy a plot of land will help you buy in Yakshima with the given us access to it would be our maybe we partner with someone on it. It probably won't make money, but it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and a magical, magical place in the world, in my opinion. Dang. OK, well,
Speaker: Keep Dreamin' Joy. Maybe if we raise some money or sell this company or I don't know, him win the lottery, we'll be able to buy something in Yakushima one day. Someday. I do want to go visit. I'm talking about buying property. they I've never even been there. You've never been there, but seems magical. You did buy Beppu. So, and I don't think you, you've never been there. So I think. so Yeah, that's right. Trust me on this one. Can't go wrong. You can't go wrong with the Akshima, I believe. If you go there, you'll be like, wow, this is like a, it's not Hawaii. It's more of in between Santa Cruz forest vibes and Hawaii vibes, I would say.
Speaker: and Okay. Okay. Magical. Yep. Alrighty. So any other features top of mind? That's a lot. I know there's a lot of smaller things like filters for bedrooms, things like that. Anyone listening, keep on sending them through. We are listening, but just know that as you may have heard through this podcast, we've, we have a lot. Joey specifically, it's got a lot on his plate. Thank you, Joey, for a handling of the tech on this. Aye, aye. Yeah.
Speaker: Cool. Well, very last thing. Update on our $3 ,500 house. We have signed the contract. That was honestly a painful -ish conversation, Joey, right? The explanation of important matters. Yeah. so Before you quote unquote make a contract here for agreeing on entering in the purchasing process, you have to sit through like a our explanation of important matters where the real estate agent goes over like a lot of small things wrong. I feel like this could be done honestly via email, but it was a tough communicating. We did this in Japanese for the most part.
Speaker: i thought yeah i I was actually surprised. I feel like I mostly understood everything. So I was happy with my Japanese ability there. There, you know, there's a few times where I didn't understand what he was saying, but, uh, eh, you know, I didn't do too bad. I thought, you know, understood like 70, 80%. So there you go. Any con top concerns about the house now, can we have and any concerns about the house? They don't know where the property lines are. So I remember.
Speaker: the land is like on a slope. yeah So the house was built on top of a slope. Other than that, they didn't have any concerns about the cement balcony at all. I think that's good.
Speaker: looking for a muralist. If you're an, if you're an artist that wants to maybe live in our Kita Kushi spot when we get it, after it's renovated and paint a nice mural in the front, hit us up. I think that'd be a cool project. I don't know, Joey, if this could, I think it could be really cool. Actually, if we had, we did some kind of marketing campaign where we make Akiyas, we revitalize Akiyas. I think that there's something there. I don't know if we could pull it off, but any artists that are painters, give us a holler.
Speaker: ah right Big concrete wall for you. Yep All right. Well good episode Jerry a lot to chew on here and we'll see you guys next week
