Transcript
Speaker: I mean, this, this i think is our treasured house to some degree. we We haven't put too much love into it, but I feel really good about where this sits. We had actually one of our customers, um, is a feng shui kind of person. She came here and checked it out. She gave us all these tips and and she did say the house was built to nine fifties. You got to get rid of it.
Speaker: Oh, really? i am She talked about like something red turtle. Uh, yeah. Something a red bird. I remember in there was like a good sign. And then we were looking out on the map today. And just the road beside the house there is called Red Road. So we're like, well, lot a lot of red. who Whoa, whoa, I've got Kaka Kuda Onsen pretty close to us. Sugi is pretty close to us. Red storage house onsen. A lot of red terminology in this area. Could be a vortex. Yeah, definitely a vortex.
Speaker: Welcome back to the buying a house in Japan podcast. We're coming at you today with a video podcast from our actual Akiya and Myoko Kogen.
Speaker: We're sitting outside it right now on the front stoop. Stoop kids, baby. Stoop kids. You can see, ah you know, grass is overgrown. We have not been here in a year. it's it's pretty It's pretty much a full year since we were last here and only our second time here total.
Speaker: This episode, we are going to do a little bit of a deep dive on this property, discuss a little bit about our plans for the future and really kind of just... observations of the area, I'd say.
Speaker: um First observation, beautiful off season, Miyoko, this whole region, the ski region in Japan off season. It's really nice. You know, the tourists are not here. I haven't been here during tourist season. I can only imagine, but yeah. And you know, not a lot of people, um, weather is beautiful. It's October right now.
Speaker: Yeah, and Myoko, for anyone who's not familiar, is a very, very hot ski, snowboard town. i would say as far as like the Japao rankings it goes, Niseko is the most popular or coveted, followed by Hakuba.
Speaker: I think Myoko's got number three. Daisan. Maybe Nozawa Onsan. We just came from Nozawa as well. But um yeah, Myoko's located in Niigata, so about three hours from Tokyo. Took us about four hours to drive here though, right?
Speaker: Yeah, we sat for lunch and coffee and stuff like that. Okay, Joey, what's the story of this house? How did we how did we get here? um How much did we buy it for? you know what what's What's the background context here? I'll give you my ah take on the whole...
Speaker: um how we got this house. So we bought the Beppu house in, we closed October, 2023. And you know, we started tearing down walls, all that kind of stuff.
Speaker: And then we had the idea to get a home base in Tokyo. After Beppu house, realized we were, so we were spending a lot of time in Tokyo still for business meetings. We were setting up a business, et cetera. And at that time getting that second house the following June. So we bought our first house, October following June, we bought the house in Tama city in Tokyo. I thought things were moving fast.
Speaker: I thought like, wow, we just bought one house. We're buying a second one. This property kind of came around that July or August. So I was already feeling like things are moving very quickly.
Speaker: And then our real estate that we were working with at the time told us that his boss had gotten this off-market deal in Miyoko. And ah we had already been seeing a tremendous amount of interest in Japao, anywhere ah Japan's ski country.
Speaker: um because skiers are chasing that powder that Japan is well known for now. And the price was ah crazy crazy cheap. you know Given that you know housing prices are quite elevated in Japan's ski towns, this place was so cheap, we decided to make a move on it.
Speaker: How cheap you may be thinking? $3,500 US dollars. Yeah. This bought us this house you can see behind us. I think we estimate it was built in the 1950s. ah The lot size we just found out, we have about 300 square meters. So we have found out we have a whole extra lot behind this. But the bill the building itself is quite big.
Speaker: um You can take a look at our Miyoko video where we do the walkthrough. We just went through again. It's actually interesting. it's It's a lot better than I remembered it. I think like the the area is better.
Speaker: don't know. What do you think? Lot size seems bigger than I remembered it. I agree with you there. um The area seems, yeah, I think the area seems better coming out of second. We were just in Nozawa Onsen, which is like, you know, very cute town for me. It reminded me of Bavaria, maybe Telluride as Taki mentioned as well, you know, cute ski town.
Speaker: And this Myoko Kogen is like more forested than Nozawa Onsen is. This like felt like, oh, we're going into like a ah ski forest kind of area. And so, yeah, I do think, ah you know, coming a second time around, I thought it was very, very nice surroundings.
Speaker: We've had this property for almost officially a year. And there's some, I guess, some extra things. So we bought this as, ah again, off-market deal, $3,500. We actually ended up paying like a lawyer fee, which was a little gray zone. I think that was another $2,000, $3,000.
Speaker: We also paid a real estate proper acquisition fee or buyer's agent fee, which is also probably another $3,000. So I think all said and done, spent about $10,000 to get this spot in our name at this point.
Speaker: Yeah, given the off market nature of the deal, there were a few intricacies and a lawyer was involved in. So that's why that ah lawyer fee was there. So yeah, under 10,000 for Miyoko Kogen is incredible.
Speaker: I would say i see properties on Akiyo Mart kind of not this area, a little, you know, 20 minutes out from here down a long path that, you know, isn't getting shoveled or plowed in the winter for You know, minimum $60,000, I think is maybe like the cheapest you can get. And it's not even in this area. So I think this area is more like the $100,000 kind of um price range. So yeah, phenomenal price.
Speaker: Why is this property so cheap, Joey?
Speaker: This property was cheap. I believe that we don't know too much about the backstory of the previous owners, but I think the um it was two old, an elderly couple. I think the husband died and then the wife ah was left with the property and sounds from the explanation of important matters to my best memory is that she wasn't fully capable of making decisions for herself anymore. So that's why this lawyer was involved. And I think he was managing the family's estate at that point, likely unpaid. And then he just wanted to get rid you know get get rid of this property and and and you know stop um ah you know managing everything for this family. And so I think he was just trying to sell the property as fast as he could.
Speaker: And then that's why he asked us for a fee as well for facilitating and and having managed the ah affairs for this family. The property is also next to a huge graveyard. Which doesn't bother us. It's actually, we'll take a video of it.
Speaker: It's, I think, quite beautiful. There's a really nice shrine. I think all the the graves are taken well care of. We have some awesome Japanese suit behind us. Forgot the graveyard. I actually like the graveyard, but I do agree. that's isn't Is it haunted? That's a big reason why the price is cheap. it's not haunted.
Speaker: um But yeah, we got the property off market pretty cheap, but also we are good customers in the sense that we were like, we are going to buy it as is. We know it's effed up. you know We're going to not complain. And we had been good buyers before with this agency that helped us buy that.
Speaker: I think they also communicated that like, hey, they're going to be good customers. they're not going to complain. They're going to take this kind of problem property off your hands. OK, so after buying it, um it's been one full year. What have we done in that full year to the property? We haven't been here at all.
Speaker: Snow was an issue. We came yeah again a year ago. We shot a video. we We made some friends in the area, just kind of scoping out the area. um Our intent was to first see, can we remodel this?
Speaker: ah We had a couple of friends, Eric actually and Jay, who came by and they looked at the structure. It's it's pretty cooked, as they would say. So we threw the idea- Structure's cooked. Yeah, renovating kind of out the window.
Speaker: um After which we decided, hey, maybe let's try to do a new build. We got in touch with a company out in California, actually, um called Seiki Studio Chemical, and they were very excited to do this partnership with us and Akiya Mart. So if you don't know our website, www.akia-mart.com, Zillow, Japan.
Speaker: Anyways, they wanted to do some partnership with us. We had started helping customers buy some of their houses. Their motive was they wanted to start working with foreigners. to sell their new build homes because the domestic demand was going down.
Speaker: Long story short, we did probably like six months of meetings. We went through the office. We had 12 Zoom meetings back and forth, and we kind of decided they they weren't the right fit.
Speaker: Yeah. it I like to describe it as, you know, sometimes, and we were just talking to a different business owner here in this in the Nozawa Onsen neighborhood, and he had a very, um he described it as like, you know, Japanese do things by the book, and if you try to deviate outside the book, they that you know road roadblocks get thrown up. And I would agree with that assessment of our interaction, ah working with Sekisui Chemical here too. I described it as ah can't do attitude, which was maybe little bit harsh, but um everything that we wanted to do from adding like a wood stove to the exterior cladding um to, I can't remember what else, but just every, it felt like every single thing that we wanted, we got told, no, we can't do that.
Speaker: Yeah, I think and there's a very different demand for Western design versus Japanese kind of domestic demand ah design. So they were very hard line, like, ah, we can't do this. We can't do this. And we were, we're asking some, I think pretty reasonable demands, like, Hey, we want an open floor plan and Their designs they came back with just like weren't the right fit. And we kind of had to make a hard call, although very, very nice guys.
Speaker: I think for the right people, they could be a very good fit. But for our kind of specific niche of what we wanted to do, we decided, hey let's um ah table the idea. Especially because I could see, say we passed other clients off to PsychoCity Chemical, I could see them having the same experience.
Speaker: experience and having the same frustrations. And it's it's not really the type of service that we could recommend to other clients either. So for that reason as well, because we don't you know really appreciate ah the service ourselves, I don't think we can recommend it to clients. Yeah.
Speaker: So after that, we kind of just put a pause on the program or pause on the idea. We're like, And this property has been kind of lingering in the back of our mind. Like, what do we do with it? It's it's a really valuable plot of land because, one, the snow. But I think Singapore invest is investing like $1 billion dollars in the infrastructure here specifically.
Speaker: um ah I don't know if it's infrastructure. They said they're doing chairlifts. They're doing a hotel. Like, they're bringing this to like, I think they're trying to make this a Niseko. Okay. Infrastructure for their own ski resort, not for the town. Yeah, ski the ski resort. So um we had a lot of crazy ideas. We kind of were like, do we just give away the property? Do we sell it? Do we raffle it maybe? you know We had some ideas on what to do.
Speaker: In the meantime, winter's coming. And last year, we you know we paid it was like maybe five times total. We had to pay for snow clearing off the property. Otherwise, the building gets squished from the tremendous amount of snow they get here. And that was like Sam Manan or $30,000.
Speaker: ah Japanese yen, a pop with $200 US. s Not crazy, but it adds up. Yeah. So kind of like when we gave up, I would say, we had someone reach out to us. This company called IkigaiCo.jp.
Speaker: have those yeah Right around when I was like so funny hard, i was like, all right, man. Let's get rid of it Let's get rid of it. This property isn't working for us. We need to consult. you know I was very much on this mindset of just like,
Speaker: it, you know, there's no points, you know, kind of thing. And, uh, round, yeah we were very, and I think that you, you had agreed. You're like, all right. i Yeah. Joey doesn't want to live in a snowy area.
Speaker: I just like, it makes sense. Yeah. Not so excited about coming up to a a snowy part of Japan. Um, so I was very hard and I feel like we had agreed on it. Like we're going to get rid of this. And then this company reached out to us, Ikigai Collective, and we'll tell you about it in second, but hard, uh, hard one 80 back onto, all right, this property is kind of cool.
Speaker: um There's a ton of advantages. Again, we we underpriced. And I think with the Ikigai Collective plan that we're putting together, i think it's definitely worth it to keep the property. Yeah, so this guy Mitchell reached out to us, the CEO of Ikigaiko, and he's just like, hey, one quick chat. And one thing led to the next where he's a tiny home builder in the area in Iyama, so probably 30 minutes away from here.
Speaker: And we kind of like, we got off really well with him. You know, he was obviously English speaker, so that was a big plus. We had some communication issues with Sekisui in the past. He was ah very he knew what he was doing and i think that's what we were looking for we were really looking for like a quarterback just to handle for us because obviously we're not on the ground i don't understand snow at all and he checked a lot of those boxes so his business is he's been making these tiny homes and making them i think quite luxury uh focusing i think towards foreigners who are looking for snow country type properties
Speaker: They are like, I don't really like van life and all that kind of stuff, you know, they're above land life taking a crap in a incinerated toilet and the solar panels and that kind of stuff. And so what I like about Ikigai Collective is it is the it's a luxurious tiny home.
Speaker: And more importantly, they hook up to utilities if you want that. They can also do the off the grid solutions as well. But what I like is that they can hook into, you know, the sewer system, the the water mains, the electrical mains, et cetera. So you can have all those, uh, you know, more comfort in your tiny home. And, on top of that, it's just a well-designed tiny home as well. And again, uh, focus on the insulation as well, because he is up here in snow country.
Speaker: ah building for Snow Country. Very, very competent with how to deal with snow and that that's our weakness. So he he won us over there. We actually just came up here to stay at his demo place in Ieyama and we're very impressed.
Speaker: I think really though what turned Joey 180 and myself, I was i was wasn't full 180, but was the sauna and cold plunge. Oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Forgot about that. So in addition to these luxury tiny homes that he's building, he, uh, he's like a sauna, cold plunge snowboarder guy, but he's built a really, really nice sauna, um, in his sort of showroom demo properties that we stayed at. Uh, in addition to cold plunge, shes he has a ah second wood fired sauna as well.
Speaker: ah He also has like a big like barrel kind of hot tub, um wood fired hot tub, too. Very cool. And I think it's just great a great addition. You know, it makes the tiny home worth it, I think. Like, well, the tiny home is well designed and nice and, you know, hooked up to utilities for those nice comforts. But it's still a tiny home.
Speaker: But with the sauna and with the cold plunge, I do feel like it makes it totally worth it. So the the next steps is we met with him. We're kind of planning what do we do with the lot. He came out. He's actually just left. Really cool guy overall that I think we can work with.
Speaker: Measuring kind of the plot, where he can build. Our plan right now is to build basically three tiny homes, have two kind of individual units and one like mixed communal area. sauna and a cold plunge so the next direct step is you know we're figuring out the plans with him but we are trying to demo this house so we decided let's do a quick video podcast in in front of the myoko house before we go yeah ah you know hopefully we can get it demolished uh before the winter maybe it'll be next spring but very unlikely me and you will be back here before then so i think this is our last look at the house
Speaker: I mean, this, this i think is our treasured house to some degree. We put a, we haven't put too much love into it, but this is, I feel really good about where this sits.
Speaker: You know, we had actually one of our customers, um, is a feng shui kind of person. She came here and checked it out. She gave us all these tips and and she did say the house was built to nine fifties. You got to get rid of it is was her advice also.
Speaker: Oh, really? yeah. She talked about like something red turtle. some Red bird, I remember. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's something in Feng Shui. don't remember. The email was um quite detailed.
Speaker: But yeah, something a red bird, i remember in there, was like a good sign. And then we were looking out on the map today. and just the row beside the house there is called red road so we're like well a lot a lot of red whoa whoa aka we should figure out i've got a good onsen pretty close to us sugi's pretty close to us red storage house onsen a lot of red terminology in this area so it could be a vortex yeah definitely a vortex Anyways, what we're going to do timeline wise is we probably missed the window to demolish before winter.
Speaker: So I think most likely this house will be gone in winter. We will consider doing snow clearings or we might just let nature. Wait, gone next spring, right? Yeah. If we miss the window. Yeah, I think next spring. Hopefully by next summer or fall, we have something up here. We are hopefully working with one of our investor friends here.
Speaker: But, um you know, stay tuned. i'm I'm happy we were actually able to get out here again. One year almost from the date we we bought this place. Pretty much one year, yeah. Any other observations of the house, Joey?
Speaker: It looked like people had come and taken stuff, actually. Yeah. Our house just got looted, I think. What happened? Not... Two pictures are gone bad, but some noticeable things were taken.
Speaker: um And, you know, some people in the year that we've owned this property, um we have had, you know, a few people come and look at it when we were still thinking about, oh, can we um ah renovate this place?
Speaker: um You know, some other people have come through as well that we know. but i don't think any of them would have taken stuff uh even though they're you know we told them please take stuff but like still i think like the things that were taken doesn't add up might be family members like the photos were taken yeah photos were taken we were like i last time we'd come here we're the photos are are like some of the photos i think are really good and we should we should save them and we actually found a photo book that we took out but we did our final pass through the house it's um It's beyond fixing. I feel like we're going wait. That was our our goal when we bought it, um, since
Speaker: April, they put in the new building codes law for wooden framed two story homes that it makes it harder to do renovations on this place too. So just yeah all signs are pointing that we're going to try to do a new build. We're going to have a dope sauna here, dope cold plunge.
Speaker: Some really cool portrait photography in the photo album. So we'll, we'll do our best to cherish that and maybe frame some of them, put them up in our properties as well. yep thank you very much myoko house i hope we have a successful demolition i hope we can make something really awesome here follow along the journey i think this opens up a door for us of helping people buy not only land but also like get a full build on it maybe run it as an airbnb or ah ski home because i i think um yeah this is
Speaker: Anyone that bought this house would have to demolish it. So i hopefully we do it tastefully and with more style and grace than the average average person, Joey. And if you're still listening this far along yeah and haven't liked the podcast yet, hit that like button. Since our hundredth episode, I told people to like the podcast. Thank you, guys. You know who you are if you've done so.
Speaker: Please like us again. We're trying to go road to 100 or at least catch up to the episode number of how many likes we have. We have a lot of listeners. We've got a lot of good feedback. And um yeah, thank you so much for listening and look forward to the next Miyoko update.
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.
Speaker: That's A-K-I-Y-A-M-A-R-T.com to find your dream home in Japan. If you've got questions or feedback, drop us a line, email contact at akiyamart.com.
Speaker: 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. Thanks again for listening, and we'll see you next week.
