Transcript
Speaker: Hey, y'all. We got another fun kind of scattered topic episode today. We cover a couple issues we've recently had with our website, talk about maybe consolidating some of our Akio investments.
Speaker: And lastly, we talk about the struggles and wins of establishing a Japanese corporation. This one's a packed episode. Per usual, take a look at the show notes to skip around and find the topic that interests you the most.
Speaker: And I hope you enjoy the episode.
Speaker: Welcome back everybody to another episode of the buying a house in Japan podcast. The number one Aki podcast in the world. We're getting up there in episode counts. I remember talking, you told me early on that like most podcasts don't make it to episode 13. We are about to smash that record, pass that record almost at episode 100.
Speaker: Episode 93, let's go. Joey, I've been editing this podcast in every episode for the past three episodes. you've been like, we're almost at 100. Who's going to be our 100th guest, do you think?
Speaker: a Good question. Applications open now. Applications open now. What do we discuss? Maybe it's a recap episode, I think, or I'm not sure. Maybe we grab some beers or something and just ramble for two hours from what we learned.
Speaker: A candid recording of a... Yeah. ah Maybe, yeah, I guess like recap. We started this journey April 2023 and yeah, a recap since then maybe.
Speaker: Yeah. Anyways, today on the podcast, we have three general topics we're going to try to cover. We might ramble in a whole bunch of other directions, but bear with us here. So first, we're going to talk a little bit about Akiyamart site issues, some feedback we're getting, and we want to address that.
Speaker: Second, we want to give a quick update. Like our thoughts on owning all these Akiya's properties, like how, what are we doing? And then lastly, we want to talk a little about the struggles and the successes we've had recently with our Japanese corporation that we've made.
Speaker: Joey, let's start off. What's been happening with the site? We've been getting a couple complaints lately, unfortunately. Yes. couple, two, two things going on actually right now, a little bit where we are in, or I am personally in a little bit of firefighting mode.
Speaker: right now. So at an issue with one of our scrapers is the first thing. And then the second thing is fighting duplicate listings on our platform. So let me just give a little quick brief PSA about the scraper issue because some users of our website are seeing the effects of it.
Speaker: So one of our scrapers, there's like an ID issue. So One of the websites that we are scraping switched up a bunch of IDs on us. And I use those IDs in our database to see if a listing is still live or not. So if someone or a website, a target website that we're getting listings from changes those IDs, it's going to appear that the listing ah with the new ID is brand new and the listing with the old ID no longer exists, even though it's the same listing on the target website here. So we're seeing what I saw in our data was just like a huge spike in new listings from one specific website.
Speaker: Thought that was very weird. And then doing a little bit of digging on our actually using the map myself, I noticed that a ton of properties were marked as sold or delisted in the past one, one and two days ago. So That's the issue we're experiencing right now. What I'm trying to do is get the scraper back on track a little bit still in the eye of the storm here.
Speaker: And once that scraper gets back on track, goes through all the listings, updating our database with the new IDs. So these will be brand new listings with new IDs. Then I can go back and clean up the mess that was created. So still in firefighting mode, still in the eye of the storm, but hopefully that should get, I'm expecting maybe a week for this to to pass.
Speaker: Okay. So going to explain this like I'm five here. ah For our Akiyama website, we aggregate listings from multiple different websites and Japanese real estate websites. So you don't need to go to all these listing sites.
Speaker: What we did then do is we basically put it into our database and translate stuff for folks. So at this point, Joey, would you say it's safe? we just We're having issues with one of our aggregator websites. So it's causing a couple of duplicate or not duplicates, but couple of issues as marking some listings as sold. So if you are experiencing that, just know we are fixing that.
Speaker: This episode will come out in a couple weeks. So hopefully it'll all be resolved by then. but Yeah, hopefully still resolved, but just know for the clients wondering what happened, maybe at the time when they do get to listen to this podcast and then wondering what happened a few weeks ago. Yes, some properties will right now look like they have been sold in the past one to two days.
Speaker: 99% sure they are not sold. This is only affecting a subset of our data as well. as not the entire catalog. It's one of several. scrapers that we run. So not the entire catalog, but for people that have saved those homes and are actively pursuing those homes, it may appear that the house is sold and um apologies for that. it was a bug on our end and hopefully we'll get that fixed in about a week.
Speaker: Okay. Next website complaint we've been getting, and I guess this is a good thing. We've started to pull a couple more aggregator sites. So you'll start seeing more listings. But with that, we have a common issue of Joey, why are there so many duplicates?
Speaker: I've subscribed to Akiyamart Pro. I'm like looking at this area and I see three of the same houses. What's going on here? Yeah, so this is, okay, so the first issue I just talked about was a bug, unexpected. This is not necessarily a bug, but it's an unintended side effect maybe of what we're doing.
Speaker: So when we source listings from multiple websites out there, we store all those listings in our database. And unfortunately, in Japan, there's no and MLS system tying all these listings together. There is something called RAINS database out there, but it's not like RAINS is providing a consistent ID to all these other listing websites. And then every property has that same ID. I think in, in America, for example, it would be tied to the land parcel.
Speaker: That land parcel will have an ID. And then I think Zillow and Redfin and all these different listings, property listers out there, the, all the listings of homes and stuff that you're seeing on Zillow, for example, will be tied to that land parcel.
Speaker: We don't have that in Japan. We just have listings out in the ether. And so if a Japanese real estate agent has a property that they're trying to sell, and they post on website A, website B, website C, et cetera, that same property that they're trying to sell now has three independent listings that are not tied together in any way. There's no land parcel ID that we can use to tie all of those properties together.
Speaker: So that that is the source of our duplicates. Now, the second logical question is why can't you just look at the price and the latitude, longitude of where the property is and the pictures to, you duplicate these listings?
Speaker: And yes, this is something that we plan to do in the future, but it's not that simple mainly because the latitude longitude is usually spoofed on listings in Japan, not necessarily spoof, but either not present or not fully accurate. And again, another reason why they do this is Japanese real estate agents don't want you, if I'm an agent and I'm trying to sell this property on behalf of a seller.
Speaker: I don't want someone coming with another agent, a buyer coming with their own agent to come and buy this property. I want to try to work both sides of the deal. If at all possible. So I want to hide where this house actually is so that you have to contact me. And then I say, no, I'm going to represent you as the buyer and I'm going to represent you as the seller. So just know that some of the data on Japanese real estate listings is spoofed or obscured on purpose.
Speaker: And that makes tying listings together quite difficult. Sometimes the price may not be the same between two different websites. Let's say someone, post let's say a Japanese real estate agent posted on Sumo last month and now they're posting on at home this month.
Speaker: But in that meantime, the price has dropped. We're going to pick up those two different price differences. We're going to pick up the spoof address on both of them. So that's a fuzzy lat latitude longitude. So we can't tie them together. The pictures unfortunately may also be different between the two.
Speaker: So there are lots of reasons why it's not so simple to just deduplicate listings like this, but this is the next big project that we're going to work on. And it will be more of a fuzzy deduplication. Maybe we'll have to use some AI or machine learning type stuff to do it. But yes, we recognize this is a problem and this is the next thing we're working at.
Speaker: Was that too technical, Take? Very technical. Just keeping it simple here. We pull from many listings. Sometimes the prices are different. Sometimes the photos are different. And sometimes the locations are different.
Speaker: We know this is an issue. We are working on it. It is a challenging problem. And like, how do we consolidate all these listings into one? But for now, the as a customer looking for an Aki, it is good to see these different listings. Because again, sometimes they're different prices.
Speaker: We're looking at a ah spot, a surf house down in the Goku area. And One of the listings has different photos, has it of the outside. So we're yeah trying to figure out how, yeah, how do we consolidate these without losing valuable information? So we apologize. We're not trying to maliciously trick people by saying we have more listings and errors. it' just is what it is right now and we're working on it.
Speaker: I would love to show less listings. I would love to be able to solve this problem and unduplicate these listings. And the problem gets worse as we add more scrapers, which is something that we are aiming to do as we move into the future. But we add one more scraper and all of a sudden the number of listings for the same house could go from three to four, four to five as we add more scrapers. So the problem will get worse. And I think it's a time that we do try to ah address this problem and it's likely the next big project that I work on.
Speaker: Speaking of adding supply, we also get a lot of feedback of, hey, you guys don't have the Akiya banks on Akiyamara. What's the deal? Going to just come out right and say it. It's very difficult. I will pass over Joey to do the technical. But before that, just know that each local government or city has their own Akiya bank.
Speaker: If you've ever been on Japanese websites, you'll know that the UI not great. The formatting is different. And basically each city seems to have its own governance of how they want to set up an Akiya bank.
Speaker: which makes it very difficult for us to go site by site and pull these listings. At this point, we are trying to actually work with some local governments to see if we can get this data directly from them.
Speaker: Needless to say, it has been very challenging working with the Japanese side, but this is something we're actively working on. Joey, any thoughts on how do we get Akiya Bank listings on Akiya Mart? Yeah, let's just say let's just assume, and I think this is probably a conservative of estimate, that there is a thousand yeah banks out there.
Speaker: Acuabank websites out there. Each one has built their website independently. It is a brand new scraping problem. So it's if you're scraping a larger website like Sumo, for example, you build rough. There's always a bunch of different stuff that needs to be done when you're working with scrapers, but you roughly build one scraper and then you can scrape all of Sumo's website.
Speaker: That's oversimplification, but roughly that's the problem. With Akia Banks, it's not just one large website that houses all these listings. It's 1,000 websites. You need to build yeah know the oversimplification that I did with a Sumo, a hypothetical Sumo scraper. You need to multiply that by 1,000 now. So the work is 1,000-fold to bring all those Akia Banks under one.
Speaker: If you were to go this go about this by scraping. And so obviously, i don't think that's the right approach here. So as Taki mentioned, I think working directly with the governments is something that we would like to do. We've been discussing this anyways, and it's probably,
Speaker: from a technical standpoint, the only real way to bring all these listings into one place and really aggregate them. The last one more interesting point I do want to bring up on that.
Speaker: We do get a lot of comments, especially on places like Reddit saying that, oh, yeah you guys don't have Akiya bank stuff. You don't have Akiya. Why do you have Akiya in your name if you don't have Akiya bank listings? Eric actually brought up a really good point but the other day when I was discussing maybe so scraping one Akiya bank site as a test.
Speaker: We had a client, I think that reached out about a property or one through one of our preferred agents in the Akiya Mart direct program. We can help you buy a house in Japan, actually for anyone out there listening, actually reached out to one of the Akiya banks about a property. And they said, no, you cannot buy this as a vacation home. You must.
Speaker: be planning to move here permanently in order to buy this house. And so that's a lot more similar to what you hear in Europe when you hear about the one-year homes in Italy or Greece or wherever they're selling these one-year homes, that there's some sort of re residency requirement and they won't sell to you unless you're planning to move there permanently.
Speaker: And we even went down this path with house in Yakushima. We were trying to, yeah, basically we're trying to see if we could squeeze by with our Japanese business And even then, i think the answer was no. So just know, even if we did, I think that's maybe a fund of another from getting this Akia Bank data is that I don't know we can help people buy these.
Speaker: Yeah, unless you're like planning to move. And I understand from the city's perspective, specifically Yakushima, when we're like, come on, let us buy this place where like they they don't want to just sell this to someone who's going to buy it and not be there and contribute to the community. So totally understand.
Speaker: If we do pull Akia Bank listings, You're going to need to be committed to that city like Eric is actually. We're telling him to be the mayor of his town in Tera Domari, jokingly Eric Domari is what we call it.
Speaker: But yeah, it's yeah two problems there. One, getting them on Akimart. Second is, can you even buy it and purchase it if are able to? Yeah, very much. It's analogous to what we spoke with Robert on our last episode about. There's a lot of apartments for rent in Japan, but They're not going to rent to Gaijin, which is they're ah they're there. They're on the market. But there's some reason why the average you know foreigner living abroad right now cannot rent that apartment. Yeah, just know there's lots of nuances in the Japanese real estate market.
Speaker: Joe, you brought up actually something. Last week was weird. like we I'm not on Reddit very often. We generally stay off our subreddit, Akia. I'm not sure how to say it. But I had my first post last week. Meng is my name. I saw that. Not the Meng.
Speaker: But no, its it's crazy. The Reddit community just started talking about us. And we had a ton of people like reach out to us and be like, hey, just FYI, this is happening. But it's good to see that we had some people defend us.
Speaker: There's a lot of... i don't know. The Reddit community is weird. I think it's a little toxic, to be very honest. But we first post... yeah I think if you're listening to this podcast, you're probably a little bit more on our side. But yeah, I think that there is a lot of...
Speaker: animosity towards us in those Reddit threads. People think we're scammers or middleman that effectively we are middleman, but I do think that we're providing a valuable service. It's difficult to just buy a house in Japan by yourself. And that's what our service provides. They're helping guide you through that process where, you know, it normally it'd be quite difficult.
Speaker: All press is good press, though. I think ultimately that Reddit thread turned around to our favor. Some people got real sassy, and appreciate the people defending us. It was just like, whoa, what is this guy doing? Yeah. you Yeah.
Speaker: Another funny thing that I did notice in that Reddit thread is a lot of people are very quick to defend, like, me and you are a startup. It's just the two it's just the two of us. It's just me and Taquit here behind the scenes. I live at my parents' house in Nova Scotia. like I don't even have my own place here. Mobile home life, baby. like like We are literally like a small business startup trying to provide a service here and help people purchase these homes.
Speaker: But people are very quick in those Reddit threads to defend the mega corporations that are sumo and at home as if as if their understanding is that defending a Japanese company, regardless of size, is better than what we are trying to do here. And I just thought that was a little bit interesting that these people are, like, if they were to step back and look what they're doing, like, Sumo is owned by a company called Recruit, which is probably owned by a private equity firm, which is it's massive corporations all the way up.
Speaker: Like, we're the little guy here. If I had to defend myself. David and Goliath, man, were I think we're jumping on the radar, at which, again, i think all good all press is good press. But yeah, if you're on the Reddit thread and you are defending us, thank you very much. I promise to God we are not scrap but we're not scammers here. We are really helping deliver people houses. I'm staying off Reddit for the next couple months. It's a weird thread.
Speaker: lot gatekeepers. I agree. I don't really like the R-Akiya community either. Next topic. Next topic. Okay, no that's it. Joey and I have been discussing our plans. We've been discussing a serve house for a little bit. We've been, at this point, just to update folks, we have six properties in Japan, all akias, all with different purposes.
Speaker: We've been talking a lot about every time we go to Japan, it's a sprint. We work our asses off. We eat like shit. We drink a lot. We don't sleep well. Thinking about trading in wealth for health.
Speaker: Maybe in this situation, it's not wealth for health, but but look we look at all our six properties and realistically, they are all B to C grade assets where we're thinking might be time to consolidate and just get something nicer, like a nice surf house.
Speaker: Thoughts, Joey? t TBC, the Tama House in Western Tokyo. I think it's sneaking up on A- now. It's an A- minus now. Definitely an A-. It's the most comfortable property. And I think I look forward actually to spending time there most.
Speaker: bet The house in Bedboot J-Lux, it's just not there yet. it's all it's It just always feels like Madaba. We keep saying, and but we're getting progress. We've recently done a lot of stuff. But i i I think we had this, maybe we had this first thought in February when we were in Yakushima. were like, do we just sell everything?
Speaker: Consolidate? And I think we might be leaning towards that now in that quiver in that portfolio that we would, if we were to sell, likely J-Lux and BetBoot, likely Myoko property, maybe the Kitakushu property are all on the chopping block. Nagasaki, successful sale.
Speaker: Otaru coming up on a successful sale. We got to cheer for that. Hold on. Let's go. we got we have officially sold Nagasaki now, right? I think today's, we closed on it.
Speaker: I think Monday for closing, but. On Monday? Okay. By the time this hits production, we have sold to an awesome family from, think they're from California and now they're in, and they they lived in Arizona. they have two kids.
Speaker: They seem super stoked on the opportunity. We again made very little money off this unfortunately, but we have successfully sold a property. So actually now, or now we have five properties. I learned five property closing on Monday. So six until Monday, but yeah, soon to be five properties. We've been saying six. We're going to have to start saying five.
Speaker: I think one thing that I learned is through this is when we got the title deeds, this is my first time being a homeowner. So maybe you thought of this differently. Take it. You are a homeowner in America. Those titles, eat some, toss them in a corner, didn't organize anything around them. We needed that title deed during this sale and we need to send it somewhere, get it hunkoed. Like the importance of when you purchase a house in Japan, you're going to get a binder from your real estate agent with a bunch of important documents in it.
Speaker: Keep those documents somewhere that you know where they are. We, at one point we didn't know where this document was. or I had a strong feeling it was in this one place. The importance of staying organized with the documents you get back.
Speaker: The top three documents that you need to keep organized, I would say, sales contract, explanation of important matters, and the title deed. I wonder how many other people in the world, though, in the past, ah in Japan, in the past year and a half, we have purchased properties in every single, in the North,
Speaker: In Tokyo, in the south, we are flying fucking fast. Yeah. not Nagasaki to Hokkaido. Hokkaido, we're trying Yakushima. Like, remember we were talking to Shu and Brett and being like, you guys are going hard mode. And actually, i thought about that a little bit. Like, we are going hard mode, but we're... Like, difficulty mode? Or difficult mode? Or they just mean, like, goblin mode?
Speaker: A little bit of both in the sense like what idiots buy properties all over Japan when they don't live in Japan full time? Or we real gidi gidi like we I don't know if we had we we barely made it with capital side. and Yeah.
Speaker: I think it was gidi gidi. Yeah, we had so many titles flying. We had so much mail, like mail flying everywhere that we are finally getting in our shit together. This last week was really a flurry of mail documents going every which way. We were not ready in terms of knowing the documents we needed, who they need to be sent to first and then set, cause some of them had to go to one place first and then one place second to get stamped or whatever.
Speaker: We weren't ready for that. And it was all like yeah oh in one week, a flurry of documents going all across Japan. Pipes are getting better. We're starting to understand. And we'll talk about actually our corporate struggles in a little bit. But going back to our so six properties, we are in the strong thought of consolidating.
Speaker: I personally want to be really proud of a property that can be like a flagship design property. think we've been really taking you know standard Akias and trying to do our best. But it's just like it's hard when the floor level is so low, maybe.
Speaker: That if we were to, let's say, sell these properties and get this property we're eyeing around Tokushima area, I think we could really make this. We could knock it out of the park. And also it could be a great place to leave a lot of longboards, do some surfing, do some work in Japan without being stuck in central Tokyo.
Speaker: Or I think maybe we prioritize a trip there in the fall. We got to go see it, I think. We were showing, who were we showing? We were showing our Google Ads coach. He's like, you guys got to put a pickleball court there.
Speaker: And I think it's not a bad idea not a bad idea, actually. First thing you said. Yeah. Yeah, I think that... I don't know what it is. Maybe it's just that Jalex has been gone on for so long or that TBC just feels more comfortable.
Speaker: But I think I... Or the fact that I do think... Let's say we put... more work, more effort into J-Lux? Is it ever going to be like, is there a cap? Could it ever rise above a B? Like, I think you could get to a solid B if it's not already a B. It's more like a min B minus B right now. Could it ever get into a class? I'm not sure.
Speaker: i think the bones, the starting place was a little bit low. If we came back into and bought that again, Jisoo J-Lux is our first Aki and Beppu that started this whole thing.
Speaker: Looking back, we probably paid too much. We probably did everything wrong. But again, you got to learn with the mistakes here. yeah Had we just bought something nicer and a little bit newer, I think it would have just made things better. I do feel like the bones of the house are okay, but I would feel a lot better if you know it was... i feel like the house is a little bit tilted. Things seem a little ghetto here and there.
Speaker: i just don't... I'd rather, yeah, again, maybe start new if there's an opportunity. I think we've learned so much. And I think like we, through that process and then buying the other five properties, think we've learned that ah maybe there is a ceiling to buying one of these 1960s, 1970s homes.
Speaker: Unless like the property is fantastic. I think the building itself, there will be like a cap on Maybe that's not true. Anton's places are fantastic. Yeah, if you if i got the budget and I think if you got that if you are in the neighborhood, like I personally would love to do what Anton's doing, but we're just not on the ground enough. like I find myself now I'm in California. I i bought a mobile home a couple of years ago. I'm just like doing some furnishing and decorating things now that I have spare time.
Speaker: That's where the magic happens, where you have a little bit of extra time just to do the nice touches, which we don't have when we're in Japan. Now here's the kicker question. Let's say we consolidate, let's say sell everything except for TBC in Western Tokyo and we buy the Tokushima house.
Speaker: How do we get there? Like the route from Tokyo to Beppu is fantastic. Taking the ferry. I wonder if there's a, ah a nice way to get to Tokushima because right now we have to go through drive through Osaka around through Hyogo down across the bridges through Awaji Island and then into Shikoku and then to Tokushima.
Speaker: And remember we did that once. We had dinner with Ryo and his wife and baby. We got there late. We got to Tokushima maybe. We probably left Tokyo 9, 10 a.m. m We didn't get to Tokushima until 9, 10 a.m. m So that's like a grind day drive. hey Yeah, i I don't know. After this last trip where I drove my parents around, it was like tough not having another driver. Usually I drive with you, Joey, and we you split. It was just like...
Speaker: I'm spurned out on driving in Japan at this point. Yeah. That I think, I'm looking at this right now. Lucky for us, baby, there's a Tokyo to Tokushima ferry. Beautiful. Let's go.
Speaker: Tokyo to Tokushima. It's called the Ocean, I can't read that, Kanji, Ocean Tokyo Ferry. Okay. that This might be the move. Let's see. Okay, so Monday, oh, it's overnight.
Speaker: So Monday through Saturday leaves at 7 p.m., arrives at whoa arrives at tokushima at one o'clock the next okay arrive departure oh yeah arrives at tokushima the next day at 1 p.m okay not bad pretty good so we can then take that tokushima ferry to kitakishu that might be the move actually where does this leave from tokyo let's see That's interesting.
Speaker: Yeah, we are big fans of the ferry boys, especially the Sunflower Ferry from Osaka to Beppu and back is really great. And I saw it very similar and maybe one one league higher from think it was Joe Etsu somewhere in Niigata to Otaru in Hokkaido. And that looked even better. So if anybody is thinking about that route, I think that's a nice way to travel.
Speaker: Also want to under hype it. I was talking to Linda, our property manager, and she was like, yeah, Joey was hyping Beppu ferry as like the best ferry. But then she started comparing it to like ferries Northern, like Sweden to fit like Finland, Helsinki, the Helsinki to Estonia. And she's like, no, those ones are better. i was like, okay, that that's fair.
Speaker: I'm comparing it to the ferry between Nova Scotia and Bar Harbor, Maine. And that is not the greatest ferry. Okay, i got Google Maps up right now. From our Tama Base Camp to the ferry in Tokyo, it is a 40-minute drive.
Speaker: Awesome. Wonderful. jump on the ferry. We get to Tokushima. Tokushima ferry. And then from Tokushima down to where we want to buy. I don't know how much we want to reveal yet.
Speaker: Again, we don't have the capital yet. It's an hour hour drive. Yeah. But it's a nice drive. I think we could hang out with a couple friends in Tokushima. Become Shikoku boys.
Speaker: All right. Wrapping up this topic, I agree. I think wealth for health. learn We've learned so much behind these Akias. I think it's time to use that information that we learned and achieve the next level up.
Speaker: Slim out the quiver. Yep. So if you're listening to this, Joey and I haven't discussed this, but Jisogi Luxor Batboo Spot is like pretty done. It's really close. And maybe I don't know if we're ever going to think it's done, but.
Speaker: It's also the most walkable of all our properties. Most walkable. That will be a little bit of a shame to give up, but just know like, Of the other six properties, they're not very walkable. This, Beppu Jalex, you can walk to restaurants, cafes, etc. We know this property the best, yeah. And we just got a lot of good cleaning done on the side. it's I think we start positioning to sell, maybe get some videos in fully furnished. We're going to get the Mimpaku license on it. We actually have a separate office space, so...
Speaker: If someone wanted to start a business, that's true business manager. So this is loaded locked and loaded. i didn't even think of that, but you're right. So we, yeah, we walled off. There's two entrances to this property and it's the two completely set. It's not a full second unit. It's just like at an office that has its own entrance, but very important for.
Speaker: business manager visa or employee visa as we have learned in the past few weeks. So yeah, Minpaku license, business manager, visa ready property. And we've cleaned it up, put a lot of effort and work into it. So yeah, if anybody's out there listening and interested.
Speaker: We put in honestly like a hundred K in total at this point. Like I would say that's- For sure. Yeah, for sure. Let me just, want to take a quick look around the area on Bapu. What gets, what,
Speaker: What will hundred k get you? Yard space, I think. That was my understanding, but I looked long time ago. Okay. but I think i would... Yeah. Yeah. It'll get you yard space, but the properties themselves are still pretty... Still need a decent amount of work.
Speaker: Okay. Yeah. I feel confident that we should we could sell this for more than 100K for the right buyer, considering... i don't know. We've really done it and we can speak to it. So I think next time we go to Beppu, we and get some videos, some photos. If any listeners are interested, I think we are open to selling this. Again, we want to sell and just paperclip to Ferrari, buy another house in Tokushima.
Speaker: Yeah. Okay. Last topic of the day, trials and tribulations of starting a business in Japan. So boy long story short, Taki and I have a second business one. So our first business is in America. Our second business is in Japan.
Speaker: It's the equivalent of a C Corp, the American C Corp in Japan, a KK Kabushiki Geisha. And the name is Takamori. And I would say we are, we started this business March, I think incorporated March, 2024.
Speaker: It has not been easy since then. People have asked us about businesses and I always steer them away. I can't recommend this honestly to anyone, unless I think Eric is maybe the only person that I've recommended starting starting a business to.
Speaker: He wants to move to Japan. That makes sense. It has been very difficult to manage this business remotely, not being on the ground, not having documents, all that kind of stuff. We call this, you'll hear us call it TKK, basically, where Takamori is a company name. And there's a couple types of companies you can make in Japan, like a KK, which is equivalent to C Corp, as Joey mentioned, and also a GK, which is more like an LLC, maybe.
Speaker: You should take a listen. We recorded podcast with Shemax League a while back. They helped us make the company, which was a very smooth process. It was really... Everything after that, I think was just like, yeah, holy crap, dude.
Speaker: Do not want to do that Yeah. and Incorporation was actually very smooth. So you need a Shiho Shoshi, Shiho Shoshi to do it. That was actually the smoothest thing. I think it only cost us like 2000 bucks.
Speaker: Then I think we put in a thousand bucks for initial capital. And that was actually, that was quite smooth. That process. We had actually made, so our main goal of making the Japanese company was to get a Japanese bank account because we wanted to operate a lot of these Airbnbs and we needed to, or our properties and utilities, stuff like that. So we made the KK. Pay taxes. Yeah. We made the KK to seem more legit. I don't know if this is valid advice, but people were like, oh, the KK is more like a legitimate company in Japan.
Speaker: named a Japanese company name just to be like, okay, we got to get this bank account at SMBC. I actually think it's true. So again, i think we touched upon it lightly in the other process. I'm exploring a employee visa in Japan, but even with the business manager visa or startup visa, it does sound like so much is based on, for example, a physical office.
Speaker: Does it look like a physical office? It doesn't matter if you, yeah, perception is so important. So maybe we did make the right decision with the KK because that seems to be what the advice people have given us. Oh, the GK is perceived as less serious than the KK.
Speaker: And ah silly as silly as it sounds, like this is how business works in Japan. And maybe we did make the right choice. So we won't know until, or I guess, we yeah, who knows. but Looking back, we talk a lot about like, the there's a lot of competitors in the space now.
Speaker: There's a lot of people that are obviously the Akia space quite hot, but I do think this is part of our moat. Like we really had to grind to get where we are. Like Joey's, oh my God. If you look at SMBC online, Joey, i have was huge screen sharing and I was like, holy crap, Joey, this is impossible. Like how'd you figure this out? It's so bad.
Speaker: Really had to rely on all that economics courses I took at ICU in Japanese, reckon to be able to read some of this kanji here. So yeah, it's all in kanji. It's all financial banking terms. Obviously I still use Google translate and chat GPT for stuff, but I would say it is very intimidating. It is incredibly complicated.
Speaker: i feel pretty good now with making trans. I know how to, we accept money. It's fine. We never had many issues recently. We had issues to start right now We don't have many issues accepting money. But yeah, making transfers to other Japanese businesses, I feel very confident there now, but it's honestly just me memorizing the steps. I know I got to do these five steps and I've memorized what they call everything in the steps, but it's crazy how complicated it is.
Speaker: Yeah. So we, when we made the KK, you need to have a Japanese representative director. So this was a new term to us. So you basically need to have someone in Japan who will represent your company. So we initially went with a company called Japan Outsourcing Solutions.
Speaker: Sorry, quick clarification there. You don't need to have a Japanese representative director. In fact, it was, yeah, it can be whoever, but you're not going to get at bank accounts or anything really, unless you have Japanese representative director or someone with permanent residency was the way we went about it.
Speaker: So yeah, we basically paid our way through the problem, mostly paying JOS quite a big fee. I think at this point, ah there's been a lot of shifts with them. So we are actually shifting away from them, but thankful that they got us to where we were.
Speaker: Just know it took us a lot of money. I think we're paying like 2,000 bucks a month almost just to have have someone as a rep director, which they from their perspective, they're taking legal risk on your end if you get sued or they are putting their name on the line. So I understand why they did that. So took us about a year, but holy crap, Joey, we have a new representative director.
Speaker: We won't name him on here. Maybe we'll bring him on, but our guy, we call it kate let's call it for short right now, has joined our Takamori company finally. Yeah. And it's been great having KBZ on things are just moving so much faster. And like, I get like the company we were working with previously, where we same sort of thing we were paying to have someone else as a representative director. That was more of a business kind of relationship. We had, we happened to have met KBZ beforehand and had made a little bit of a friendship with him first. And I think it's just so much smoother.
Speaker: working this way with our representative director than having a business to it. But you got, we had to start somewhere. Yeah, if we were to do it all over again, i would honestly find someone and make a relationship with someone you trust in Japan to be this representative director to thread the needle for you.
Speaker: Obviously, you can do this without someone like that, but if someone that is familiar with Japanese bureaucracy, paperwork, just the systems, KBZ has made it so much easier for us. and We're just like, hey, can you apply for this? He knows where the hanko is. He knows where's the ink on Shomei Sho. He knows what he needs. and That has just been such a big game changer for us that I feel like for the first time, Joey, we have control of our Japanese corporations.
Speaker: but Yeah, it it is feeling more and more like that. what i i think if I were to rewind to the start of TKK to where we are now, the phases of the difficulties we had changed. Like initially, but okay, after incorporation was easy, but after that it was all...
Speaker: bank account setup that I think at least took three months. And even once we had bank account setup, we didn't have online banking, which we have to apply for. We did get accepted. We had to apply for a credit card and all these things take very heavy monthly fees. But even then, initially when we first got our bank account, when people would send us money or we would send money to the account, SMBC would freeze it.
Speaker: I think just right off the bat, I don't know if there was any like rhyme or reason to it. Maybe we were just a new business, but like money gets frozen and then you get a call. So when you set up the bank account, again, this was the accounting company that we worked with before who would get the call, but Like we didn't have a Japanese phone number at that time. They would get a call from the bank and then the bank would ask whatever questions they asked about the transaction.
Speaker: this accounting company that was helping us would answer them. And then finally the money would get unfrozen. But so I think phase one was all on banking related. Phase two, which I feel like we're ending phase two was getting work out of this accounting company. So phase two was all about this accounting company got acquired.
Speaker: And unfortunately in that turnover, our representative director was leaving that accounting company. And so any work that we needed to get done was a little bit put on pause. There were a few like urgent things. I think we did get through like our, account like obviously our tax accounting and stuff like that, but anything else was really put on pause and our company was gridlocked for a long time. We were, we had the bank up, so we were accepting money and sending money, but things like trying to get KBZ on as representative director, changing our address, which we're about to go through. selling a property, buying property, things need to get stamped and hunkoed. And our accountants had the hunko at that time.
Speaker: This phase, I would say is ending now that that phase of gridlock, but that was the second phase of the trials and tribulations. so Yeah. And I'd say like something that I've become, I both joined, I've become an acutely Aware is like just how important mail is. We mentioned it before that these documents need, you need someone on the ground and you need a good system to deliver mail, to accept mail, to forward it. Because as we did this sale for Nagasaki, we needed documents from everywhere. We needed our deed to be mailed. We needed.
Speaker: an Inkan Shomei show, which is like a proof of, i don't know, Jerry, how do you, proof of seal certificate seal certificate, just like that this is our company and we needed to get a contract hunkled and sent back that, man, like we we are going fully on mailmates.
Speaker: They're like a post-purchase service that we recommend. They digitize mail and we're like, John Cross, who we we've had on the podcast before. John, just take our money, man. Make sure we our mail is digitized and can be forwarded correctly.
Speaker: Because this was a mess. It was very stressful in that we needed closing dates. We had like three four different people moving mail for us last week. Yeah, but thankfully, I think we got it done.
Speaker: Again, now we know. And now that we've done our first sale, we do at least know the documents we need to get prepped. I feel like our... Shiho Shoshin agent just expected us to know, honestly, because we've done so many purchase transactions.
Speaker: But yeah, going back to it the mail is something you really don't expect in Japan being as important as it is. And yeah, plug for MailMate, just go with MailMate. They're a little bit expensive, but i they're 100% worth it Yeah, worth every penny. And I feel like that, I got some advice from an accountant yesterday when talking about bookkeepers and he was like, you don't want to go with someone where you're like, that was so cheap. You want to go with a bookkeeper accountant where you're like, that was expensive, but worth every penny. And I do feel that way.
Speaker: I agree mail way more important in Japan than we realized. And yeah, mailmates, they are working with us for, we're getting them on all our properties and they're just fantastic. You get scanned documents and then you can even forward it to where it needs to go. And that's exactly what we were doing last a week, but just manually.
Speaker: Yeah. Okay, Joey, last topic of the pod and maybe the most pressing for us at this point, as Joey had mentioned, the last accounting company where we marked our business offices got bought out and we're shifting our company address. This kind of coincides with two things that we're working on. One is a visa for Joey and also a company, i permanent company address.
Speaker: Joey, what's the, give us the lay of the land on the situation here. Yeah, so mine are so just, yeah, for everybody out there, I'm thinking about spending more time in Japan, let's say six months a year in Japan. I don't want to be maxing out tourist visas. So I'm looking for a way to spend at least six months in Japan going forward.
Speaker: And there's three different visas that people that you listeners might've heard of. There's a startup visa, the business manager visa, and then an employee visa, startup visa. You can't have an established company already. So that's out for us. We already have Takamori up and running.
Speaker: have a bank account and everything like that. The business manager visa, the way it was described to me is this is a little bit harder to get. There's more ah restrictions. You need more upfront capital to get this visa. And it's really only an op or it's not only an option, but most people that go for this visa, they are a single person business.
Speaker: They are the, their own representative director of the business. And they're trying to get some sort of immigration status in Japan. The immigration lawyer I've been speaking to, she said, I have the luxury of having Take and KBZ now as representative directors of the business. So she recommended I apply for the employee visa, ah officially called the humanities visa, because that's easier to get. And I have that option open to me.
Speaker: Now, the thing with the how this ties into the address change is that For a business manager visa, it is a hard requirement to have a physical office in Japan for your visa. That's what we mentioned about the BetBoot property has fits this requirement.
Speaker: So one of the things about using property you purchased in Japan to get as this home office is you cannot get to the office by going through any living spaces. There needs to be ah at least a separate entrance.
Speaker: But on top of that, you still know guarantee that it works. This is all a perception game. It seems with immigration ah officers, it needs to look like a serious Japanese business office to the person adjudicating your application for the visa. Even then go with what an immigration lawyer says again, this, I'm not an immigration attorney or anything like that. Speak to someone knowledgeable, but The physical office is a hard requirement for the business manager visa and a soft requirement for the employee visa.
Speaker: That being said, it actually seems like a hard requirement for the same employee visa. It's the same thing. Officially, it is not a hard requirement, but unofficially, it is a hard requirement.
Speaker: We've been trying to use... TBC as our office and for the purposes of me getting this employee visa. But, and again, we're speaking to the immigration lawyer sometime next week.
Speaker: Doesn't seem like that's going to work out again. There's too much residential space going on with this house. Even though it doesn't matter that me and Takei work from this home, you know, I work from cafes. I don't need to, I spend most of time at the barn, my home Bay, if anybody's in Nova Scotia, that's where I do most of my work.
Speaker: I don't need a physical office, but just know rules are the rules in Japan. You got to play by these rules. And this is a personal point of frustration for me. So I'm still trying to get over these frustrations, but. We wanted to move our home office, sorry, our Takamori TKK headquarters, official registered address to TBC, the Tama house.
Speaker: That becomes the headquarters. so And we wanted to use that as the physical office space for the purposes of this employee visa. That is not going to work out apparently. So we're looking for other options for the physical office space.
Speaker: But the point that I think the whole spiel I'm going on here is what we learned and another sort of trial and tribulation with starting a business in Japan, changing that address from wherever it is now, just to TBC, we were quoted two to three months.
Speaker: Our business would be our business activities would be locked up for two to three months just to make that address change. Yep. So just, I don't know. We're going to figure, this is the next thing we're figuring out just because we do need to get an address changed. And we have to thread the needle here because we are working on an old Taudu project that if we're mid process of changing our address, we cannot go through with that sale we've learned.
Speaker: For some reason, like Shiho Shoshi's had some way of seeing that, oh, your company is in mid change. You can't do anything kind of thing. We had that with the Nagasaki property. Yeah. And KBZ coming on as representative director that took, I don't remember how long, that's at least a month, or maybe long five, five. We started a long time ago. Actually, that's true. That took a long time. So our business was locked for a month at a time, maybe five months at a time. And we luckily KBZ came on at around the same time that or we got that finished at around the same time we sold the Nagasaki property. So there was a little bit of gridlock, but it wasn't for too long.
Speaker: But yeah, with an address change, we're to be back in that same position again. Yeah, to summarize everything here, if you're listening, you're looking at buying Anakia, just know it is a long journey if you want to make a company.
Speaker: i I think honestly, owning Anakia under an US-based LLC might be a better idea and maybe get some of the benefits you're looking for. If you are looking to make a company, whether it be a GK or KK, I think the big thing you need to have identified is, are you moving to Japan permanently?
Speaker: We're trying to get a visa. Yes, no. If you are, contact us. We can try to connect you with some of the folks we've been working with. I actually think there's a lot of I see a lot of people on LinkedIn posting like this is what they do too. So yeah I think they're also a good option. i think actually Mailmates, John Cross, who we mentioned also does something related to this where he can outsource Shihoshi and use his address.
Speaker: Yeah. What you want to look for with these posts on LinkedIn is I think they call it back office services in Japan. So they'll handle like incorporation. You need a physical address. So they will have that address for you.
Speaker: They'll have a representative director for hire, all that stuff. There are companies that do this for you. In another life, or maybe our next business, I really do think there's a really, really big opportunity on here on how can we streamline and help foreigners open up these businesses from the lessons we've learned.
Speaker: I know there's people already doing it, but i think there's a need. and There's a huge need. And we clearly took the hard route, unfortunately, but yeah. I think like what, yeah, again, there's ah like a very similar with the home buying process. Like for example, I see a lot of similar areas between requesting power of attorney from a client buying a house in Japan. Like, why do I need to power of attorney? Why is it sometimes two powers of attorney? What's a Scrivener? Like that sort of, I don't understand what's going on.
Speaker: And the same thing with like, for we didn't know it was going to take five months to get a representative director on board. We didn't know that it's going to an address change takes two to three months and locks up business activity. I think a lot of like transparency in the process is missing.
Speaker: Yeah. Also didn't know if you're buying a car, maybe don't buy it under your company. We've incurred a lot of extra costs. We have to do the shotgun once a year now. It's a whole mess, but I think it's usually once every two years.
Speaker: Our other bestie, Eric, is working on the car game. We know this is maybe the next area. Like it'd be awesome to have a garage by Narita. You land, you get your car, you drive it. Someone maintains it. They do the shotgun, all that stuff.
Speaker: But that's a conversation for another day. Yeah. Again, i think like our learning, learn from our mistakes here. it only try go down the route, I would say, of trying to start a business in Japan unless you are like dead, dead serious. It is going to take way more time, way more frustration and way more money than you expect.
Speaker: Okay. For the final segment, Joey.
Speaker: Spine.
Speaker: Okay, Joey had a really good idea. i think a lot of podcasters do this, including Tim Ferriss. So I heard this on Tim Romero's podcast. He has a podcast called Disrupting Japan. Usually like VC business focused in Japan. It's pretty good podcast. He doesn't have too many.
Speaker: Oh, he's actually got a lot of episodes. going to say doesn't have too many episodes. He's got lots of episodes. Check it out. Disrupting Japan, Tim Romero. He has been, of the episodes I've listened to he's been asking people his question at the end, very similar to what Tim Ferriss does with his billboard question. Tim's question is, if you had a magic wand and could change one thing about Japan, it could be something we spoke about on this episode or something completely different.
Speaker: What would you change? All right, you go, then I go. Okay, man, something about Japan would be, I think loans.
Speaker: We're really interested in getting a loan from Japan, especially these lower interest rates, because we are trying to buy this house in Tokushima that is just well beyond what we have in a cash reservoir.
Speaker: I think that would really change the game for the Akia space if you could get a loan on maybe a cheaper Akia. Again, most people don't have hundred thousand cash. So I think that would be something if I could wave a wand, if for some way we could get financing on some of these houses, I think that would be a seismic shift and would move the needle in especially the Akia space and foreigners buying.
Speaker: What about you, Joey? Magic wand. Magic wand. I think that
Speaker: Personally, I get a lot of frustration from the, hey, can I just have the parfait with nothing, just the ice cream? Just change Japanese culture. Is that what you're going to use your wand for? Yeah, I don't know. Actually, when you're... I don't know what I would change right now. I think that... But I think that rolls up into the bigger sort of frustrations that I have in Japan is that it's like the rules that I...
Speaker: I don't personally agree with, but I think that most people would be like, this doesn't make sense. It is just the way it is, but it doesn't make sense. So for example, ah you need a physical office to, as a requirement for one of your visas. Like I don't need a physical office to do work. In fact, we're already a profitable business in Japan and we we don't have a physical office. So those sorts of things don't make sense to me and causes me frustration. Similarly, how,
Speaker: Like I personally tie that in to the parfait story where it make changes to an order in a restaurant in Japan kind of thing. And it's like, why not? I'm asking for less than what I'm paying for kind of thing. So I don't know. I don't really have a good answer for you, but I think there's it's not a specific thing, but it's all those rolled up into one for me. I have a lot of personal frustrations with the rigidity.
Speaker: of so many systems in Japan and just countless of them. It's Japanese called it culture, both good and bad, but. I don't expect to change that. And I need to learn to, I'm getting, but I think I'm getting, I hope I'm getting better. run into Learning to live with it.
Speaker: you're Maybe you're getting better. I still, see I see, I still see the glimpses of, harm you seem red. I'm like, oh no. Okay. Another question, actually, I asked Robert this in our last podcast that I personally like, especially as a lot of our listeners are discovering Japan here.
Speaker: If you had a million dollars, Joey, Where would you buy a vacation home in Japan? Somewhere warm. I think I want to avoid Canadian winters going forward. So Japan has some subtropical islands. I think those are what I'm looking to explore.
Speaker: Our friend Tatsu showed us some pictures he took of one Yoron Island. Looked incredible down in, i think it's still Kagoshima. I don't think it's Okinawa yet, but yeah, tropical island is my my goal here.
Speaker: All right. All right. I'm in the same zone. I'm still team Yakushima, dude. If we if had a million dollars and could you just buy like a sweet concrete box in Yakushima that's isolated, has a lot of trees, view of the ocean, i think that would be maybe a sweet sauna in it. That would be the perfect like workstation in my opinion. So Yakushima and Yodon were both tropical boys.
Speaker: Concrete espresso bunker. Concrete rainforest espresso bunker. With sauna and cold plunge and access to surf. and There we go. And good speaker system. I don't know. I'm asking for too much here.
Speaker: Amami Island. That's why. Amami might be a good middle ground. We'll see. I want to check it out maybe this winter. All right. We are planning to be back in Japan in October. I think we will maybe host an event maybe post Kumano Kodo.
Speaker: Stay tuned. We are organizing. Again, if anyone has done the Kumano Kodo, would love any tips, please reach out at contact at akiamart.com. And yeah, if you're interested in checking out our website or you have any questions, please feel free to reach out anytime. And thank you for listening to the podcast.
Speaker: Hit it.
