Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to the Buying a House in Japan podcast. My name is Take, joined by my co -host Joey. And today we have a super special guest. He's been on our podcast a couple of times, probably the most requested guest we have. We have Ziv Nakagawa from Nipon Tradings International. Ziv, how are you doing? Excellent. Thank you. And hello to all Akio Mark listeners, not viewers, right? We're audio only. Only audio today. So you can do whatever you want on video if you want.
Speaker: Ziv is the person that made all of this possible. Okay. We'll send you the video after, but for our listeners, only audio. Yeah. I was saying, Ziv is a person that made this all possible for us. He's the one that first showed us the ropes and made something that seemed super complicated, super scary, buying property in a different country, simplified it and showed us that it is possible. Ziv, thank you again. And thanks for being on the podcast with us.
Speaker: Totally our pleasure. I think we've created a monster helping you there, but yeah. Tell us a little bit about yourself. I know we've recorded two podcasts with you, I think at this point, but for our new listeners here, can you give us a quick intro on yourself? Sure. The short version, born in Israel, moved to Australia in my late twenties, married into Japan, coming and going from Australia to Japan for about a decade, and then finally moved here and started doing business here.
Speaker: And we've been helping people for the last 12, 13 years now in purchasing, managing, and selling real estate in Japan, including when I say management, it's also including bigger stuff like renovations and rebuilds and heavy repairs and stuff like that. How did you get into real estate in the first place? What's the origin story there?
Speaker: The quicker version. Yes. I was thrown into being an accidental landlord when I was living in Australia. I inherited a property that had tenants in them, in it. And then a few years later when I wanted to do business in Japan, no more correctly, when I wanted to invest in Japan for the first time, that was naturally what I drifted towards. Cause I already knew it all, knew it at least a little bit. Met my then business partner and now also my life partner Chika Kusan. And doing that purchased our firm.
Speaker: We figured out there'd be a lot of people who need help with that, Japan's business environment being what it is. Were there any resources back when you first started helping foreigners understand the Japanese market, buying property here, or you figured this out on your own? No, there were a few, but the ones that publish the best content tend to be, or the ones that do the best job still to this day, the English speaking ones tend to be focused on particular markets tech.
Speaker: Very good real tour in Tokyo. A few actually, one of them, which would be very worth mentioning is Zoe Ward from Japan Property Central. She's got one of the best resources in English on the web, but she only, her billion dollar property sales, like she's not going to serve the people that you and I do. So.
Speaker: I don't think there was anyone who was actually covering the entire country. Yeah. Nobody who covers the entire country at all levels of entry, like we do. And to this day, there are a few people who do, but I think we're probably the longest and most well -established ones.
Speaker: And as some of our listeners may know, Ziv is the host of the Japan Real Estate Podcast. Ziv, that's actually I think how we first found out about you. I think we are in Europe and we're like looking up pod and I listened to one of your podcasts. So this is really what started it. I'm curious, how long has that been going for? You guys have like hundreds of episodes.
Speaker: That's been going since 2000. Shout out to Gary Vaynerchuk who started talking about podcasts way before anybody else was doing it. I think that maybe Joe Rogan. Yeah. Listening to move in the same crowd, don't they? And I was, I was listening to him just studying how to do marketing, which I've never done before. And podcast, he successfully drummed it into my head and the, yeah, people just do podcasts these days. Right.
Speaker: Yeah. Segueing there, I'm also curious, what is the origin story of the J -Rep community or the Tracy, Emil? How did you guys get all together and how long has that been around too? In a clubhouse. So when Clubhouse came out, Emil went out there and created a Japan Real Estate Room. He and I spoke at a presentation at one of Jason Ball's business in Japan events back in Tokyo, back in the day when people were still doing a lot of face -to -face events coming back now.
Speaker: And so we were in touch, he invited me to the clubhouse room and then the others drifted in there when they went on to clubhouse. Oh, Japan Realistic Room, I'll go and have a chat there. And that's how Tracy and Matt turned up. Tracy then introduced Blanca and Anton, although he's a very busy beaver, we don't get him on the podcast app. Awesome.
Speaker: much these days. Speaking of face -to -face events, I know we have an exciting event coming up soon. Ziv, you want to talk a little bit about the event in a couple weeks? Yeah, the Japan Roost Station now and the venues and the timeline and the number of speakers, the number of guests keep getting bigger. So this is the first time we're going to be hosting it over an entire weekend. Saturday, Sunday, five, six
Speaker: But a huge list of speakers yourselves, definitely included. So all of the members of the J .R. Crew, Emil, talking about mortgages and family homes. Tracy, talking about Mintaku and Yokan short -term stay licensing and management and profitability. Blanca Kobayashi talking about commercial, like high level renovations and, and rebuilds both commercial and, and residential.
Speaker: Matt Ketchum was gone for a couple of years, but is now back talking about the hunting Akiyas and doing Akiya projects in the Japanese countryside. Anton Worman was a bit of a, a bit of a celebrity on the internet and does amazing DIY renovations and purchasing properties and then renting them out on Airbnb.
Speaker: And we've got some new speakers this year. So we've got Nick Wolsey from Japan Remotely, which is a company that helps people relocate to Japan, plan their new course of life, whether it's visas, finding a place to stay, finding an office, they plan things out for people. So he's going to have creative strategies to leverage your office or home rental or purchase into a business management visa. And Daigo Sato, which you guys kindly introduced us to, which is a rock star accountant who will be talking obviously about taxes and presenting case studies of how property owners can save
Speaker: And they become a bit more cost efficient with their tax payments. And yeah, it's, we also have breakout rooms. So while we have a presentation going in the main room, if people are more interested in different topic, then a few of us will be doing hands -on workshops and breakout rooms in another room. And the two, the double after party, that's going to be fun. Definitely the JREP summit is great. I remember just asking people, I remember I asked Anton about disposing.
Speaker: contractor waste, so at that time at the first summit, when I attended, we had already knocked down a wall in our Bepu house. And we just had this pile of rubble sitting in the middle of our tatami room and we didn't know how to get rid of it. And I asked Anton and yeah, he told me how to get the right contractor bags and that kind of stuff. So even just with chatting with the people at the after party, it was super valuable.
Speaker: Yeah, that's the best part of the event, to be honest with the connections that you can make, not just with the speakers to pick our brains, but with each other, right? Like the kind of business corporations and joint ventures and just networking that comes out is the best part. Damn, I'm excited. I have missed the past two. Joey's been holding down the fort. So this will be my first Japan real estate summit. I'm excited. I've heard the after parties are fun. And where do we buy tickets or where anyone listening here, what's the best way to purchase tickets or reserve a spot?
Speaker: So summit .realestate .jp, that's the page on meal's webpage, which will direct you to the ticketing page or the pre -registration page, depending on when you log in. I'm not sure when you're going to be publishing this, but discounted tickets are only going to be available for a couple more days. Maybe I should have mentioned that if you're publishing this in a week, they'll be gone. But there are discounted tickets still available, hopefully until 20 or 21st September.
Speaker: And the main page is summit .realestate .jp. I can't emphasize enough like how much this conference has really helped us network. I think we just recently are in the process of buying a Kitakyushu property for very cheap and that would not have happened if Joey did not go to that first summit. So thank you for holding this and anyone who's listening and
Speaker: On the fence, I'd say just do it. I think it's a lot of fun. You can't hurt networking with folks in the space. We should point out that you don't actually have to show up in person if you can. There's a very affordable streaming ticket as well, which will cover the entire weekend. And you can jump in and out of presentations and the chat room, which is very active, very good opportunity to network with people who are not in Japan.
Speaker: Yeah, especially with the time zone difference too, right? It's prerecorded or sorry, you can watch it. You don't have to watch it live, right? Ziv, you can get it and watch at a different time or do you need to watch it live if you get the. You can, you can, the presentations. Yeah. The presentations will be available for download regardless of streaming tickets. We always publish them freely online, but the streaming ticket is very good.
Speaker: work with people in the Zoom room as well. There's a lot of active chat going on there. And equally importantly, you can float live questions to the speakers and the Q &A panels, which we're going to have two of. So you can type in your questions based on something that you've heard and actually have them answered live on the day. Yeah, that's what I was going to say. The ability to ask live questions of the speakers is great.
Speaker: We'll put a link in our podcast summary. So take a look. We'll probably be publishing this in a couple of days. Get on the ticket soon before they're all gone. But all right, let's move on, Joey. All right. Zayb, one thing I wanted to ask you about, okay, moving on to some real estate questions here. So we got a lot of questions when people come and talk to us about removing
Speaker: Japanese tenants and I asked you for one of your podcasts and I went back and listened to that. And I just wanted to know if there's any updated information there. So it does seem like buying the tenant out is your best strategy. Trying to remove them legally is going to be very difficult. Is that still the best strategy? Pay them a year's worth of rent.
Speaker: It is and I should say that removing them legally in Japan at least is usually not an issue if you send a letter to a tenant six months before terms of the lease but most for expiry and tell them that you want to be using the property for whatever purpose or you want to renovate it whatever the case may be. Most of them will move out but number one knowing and I think the right thing to do is to compensate them for that because they're going to be paying somewhere between six to ten months
Speaker: maybe up to a year if they're a gaiji in a foreign tenant in all kinds of fees and security deposits and obviously the move itself. So firstly, it's the right thing to do. Secondly, Japan's legislation being what it is, they do have a legal leg to stand on if they end up taking you to court, which
Speaker: Again, it hasn't happened to us and doesn't happen with most Japanese tenants who are very docile by nature and try to avoid conflict. But if you have a foreigner tenant, especially a Western foreign tenant of mid -Yumu or a plus income, and they know their rights, I think the Japanese know the rights too. They just can't be bothered going to court and try to avoid the conflict. But bored pensioner, destitute Japanese men certainly have a lot of time on their hands and they like to
Speaker: bother their property managers with all kinds of requests that aren't exactly logical or definitely would get into that in full force. We had one tenant who actually contacted Shiro Shoshi, a lawyer, to support him to try and
Speaker: So just to make sure I understand, so for people that don't understand moving costs in Japan are quite expensive. When you do move to a new apartment or whatever, there's a lot of costs involved. You need to pay so much security deposit, so many months rent upfront, and then there's the cost of the relocation itself. And you're suggesting offer to pay the tenant, offer to cover that for the tenant as the bare minimum here to not be such a jerk landlord and very likely accept that offer.
Speaker: Yes, that's in case, if we're talking about a single door, in other cases, for example, if you own a small building, let's say four to eight to 12 units, and you want to get a bit more creative with it and convert it to say medium or short -term stays, or you want to let your friends and family stay in the units. What we recommend to do in these cases is put some notices around the building saying that you are now allowing short -term rentals and that please forgive the disturbances as tourists will be coming in and out at all hours of the night.
Speaker: that will usually suffice to get at least a few of your tenants not to renew their leases. Yeah. And then when you have one or two vacancies, you actually start using the place as an actual short -term rental that usually convinces the rest of them. Yeah. And what about, sorry. So on that note of removing long -term tenants, what about rental in raising the rent over time? So what a lot of landlords in.
Speaker: North America, there's a certain legal amount they can raise rent over time. Does that exist in Japan? And what does that look like in practice?
Speaker: It does exist not in so many words, you know, how in Japanese laws and contracts, things are left vague purposefully so that they'll be up to interpretation when the need arises. Same goes here. You're not allowed to raise the rent beyond reason. So the wording of the law is similar, but in reality, rents haven't, because salaries haven't really risen in Japan by a fraction, but nothing compared to cost of living. So as a result of that, rents haven't risen as well.
Speaker: So that legal point there is that, again, if a tenant, which is going to be rare, chooses to insist or take you to court, the rent rise is not reasonable. And a little bit of a tangent. I know you, you bought a building recently, right? How's that going? Is it done deal or you have tenants in it? That was not that recently. That was almost two years ago now, or maybe a settlement maybe about a year ago. Yeah, no, settlement was about a year ago.
Speaker: I've got a very big backlog on publishing episodes on the podcast. That's probably what you're noticing. That was going quite well. That was actually 80 % occupied before it was even built because it's a brand new building in a good location. So tenants apply in advance when there's a brand new building being built. And then the remaining two units were occupied very quickly after settlement and they're all still in there. That was the purpose.
Speaker: And so did you buy the building before it was built and like, how does that work or like, how do we ever do that? You just heard from someone and it was like a, someone approached you. Buy, develop and then sell. Or they buy a land plot, they publicize the plans that they're planning to construct there as soon as they have a buyer. And then once they secure a buyer, which was how it happened in our case, then they begin construction.
Speaker: Got it. Cool. Taking the direction a little bit different, as if you're the OG in the space here, you've been around, you've seen kind of trends in the past few years. What are you seeing nowadays? Obviously the Akia space is heating up. We're seeing it on our site. Any macro trends you see just anecdotally? The long time prices are going up, not just in big cities, but in rural areas as well.
Speaker: So the big cities, yeah, big cities have been going on for 15 years since we started, since Abhisan got into his latest stint, which was late 2000. Well, since then prices have been going up in all big cities. Some of them like Nagoya and Sapporo fluctuate a little bit. Sometimes they go stagnant again, but usually they go up as well. So yields in those big cities have been compressing steadily over time. When we started again 12 years ago, it was at about
Speaker: We could get deals up to 12%, even 14 % net before tax at six and a half. We're the center of any big city, obviously, but now rural areas are picking up in price as well. Although the people who tend to buy in rural areas or at least our customers that tend to buy in rural areas are still.
Speaker: A lot of the time bargain hunters scraping the bottom of the barrel. So there are still plenty of 1 ,000, 3 ,000, 10 ,000 properties to be had, but they're out there. What about certain areas? Are you seeing any certain areas that seem to be favorites among your clients? Yuzawa is going through a huge, a huge revive. I don't think revival, it's like the first time that it's actually becoming popular, but very popular with, as is usually the case with ski resorts, Australians are the ones who tend to start the trend.
Speaker: And then everybody else swoops in. So in Miyoko it's already happened and very big resort was announced that construction is starting there. And since then Miyoko has become quite difficult to purchase in and very far and far less affordable. Yuzawa is probably the next one as far as ski resorts go. Kumamoto city down in southwestern Japan in Kyushu, about two hours south of Gokawa we are.
Speaker: TSMC, the biggest chip manufacturer in the world, has built a huge factory there that's been drawing a lot of business and population to the area. Now they've announced that they're building a second one. So that transactions have picked up very significantly. Their prices have started crawling up, but not as bad as in other cities yet. So that's a very good place to hit. Otherwise, things remain mostly the same. The major seven cities, onsen resorts, ski resorts.
Speaker: Have you heard any chatter about the casino? That was like a casino. And can you hear me still? Okay. Yeah. Sorry. There was a little bit of a lag there, but I think we're.
Speaker: I've heard chatter of it and a lot of people are investing in picks and shovels, right? Like auxiliary services that will service the casinos if when they open, but not from a real estate perspective. No, I haven't seen anything that's at least not in the lower echelons where we work. We mainly work with cash buyers. So the deals that we handle are usually limited to maybe a million or $2 million. So in that side of the market, I'm not seeing anything related to casino activity now. Got it.
Speaker: Big question here, Ziv. If we gave you a million dollars, U .S. dollars, cash for investment and your focus is return on investment, where would you invest? Not outside of Fukuoka. I'm assuming Ziv would say Fukuoka. How passive or hands -on do you want to be is the question. Let's say hands -off. Completely hands -off. Just, I got a million dollars. I want to buy something, a building or something in an area and be pretty hands -off. Where would you look at in Japan?
Speaker: With a million US at current exchange rates, you can probably get a little bit of diversity by splitting that into two small buildings. They start pretty cheap in Japan. So you can buy a small building for about 400 ,000 US in a good location. So I'd probably get to these just to get more socio -economic and geographical diversity.
Speaker: wooden or steel -framed wood structures 20 years or younger, not super central but not mega rural so something maybe suburban or suburban close to center kind of thing within 10 minutes walk to a station. In any of the big cities it's probably not going to be doable in Tokyo and most of Osaka but most other big cities in Japan.
Speaker: You said don't mention Fukuoka, but that's one of the locations Yokohama city. If you want to stay close to Tokyo, maybe Saitama city or Chiba city suburban Osaka or Kobe. Yeah. Or Fukuoka city. Those would be my Kyoto. If we can find something coming out of there, but there's not many, there's a lot more houses. Those all sound, those sound like great ideas. What would you do with a million dollars though? This is your, as soon as your money, where would you put it?
Speaker: Can be vacation home, can't be Thailand if you want to throw a curveball in there. Yeah. So I was going to say we've already got a fair few Japanese properties. So the next one I'm probably going to be investing in Thailand. Yeah. And I'm actually looking into a project there that's still open for the next week or two. So if anybody wants to contact me and jump in, they're welcome. But today resort on my favorite Island in Thailand, Kupanga. That's going to be my next thing. Very cool.
Speaker: Do you see a lot of Thai investors in Japan or vice versa? Are there a lot of Japanese investors in Thailand? I haven't really looked at Thailand at all. Japanese definitely invest in Thailand, mostly in Pattaya and in Bangkok, and mostly condo units, which is what most foreigners who invest in Thailand tend to go for, because you can actually own that freehold or semi -freehold as opposed to landed property.
Speaker: Thai investors in Japan definitely exist. We've got one Thai customer, like Thai native Thai customer, and about three expats living in Thailand kind of customers. But having said that a lot of our customers these days that were not originally living in Thailand are now telling us that they are living in Thailand. So the whole digital nomad remote work thing has turned a lot of people into Thais, even if they weren't originally. So we do get a fair few of those. And now we were actually allowed around for a day.
Speaker: Okay, Ziv, here's another question. A lot of people, they get excited about the dirt cheap bottom of the barrel, like properties, the $5 ,000 Aki. Usually a lot of people are misinformed when it comes to these properties and they think they can get it for just $5 ,000 or even free, or they have never been to Japan. Those type of clients are clearly not the right fit. Who do you think is the right fit to purchase one of those properties? What would the client profile look like?
Speaker: I would say two types of people. One is people who are aware of and can be very hands on. So they're aware of the need to be hands on with these properties. Essentially when you're buying a very old dilapidated property or property in very bad condition for whatever reason.
Speaker: project whatever you end up doing with it it's not gonna end with that three five ten thousand dollars that you're investing you'll be pouring. Either money or time and effort blood sweat and tears kind of thing or a combination of both which is what ends up happening in most cases.
Speaker: into the property so if you've got a creative project in mind like you're going to set up a hospitality property there or a restaurant or a shop or something that kind of feeds into the community like in a permaculture farm or something of that sort and you're aware of what it takes a lot better if you've done it before and you know that you need to promote and market not just the property itself but the entire rural area that's
Speaker: people and fun and interesting to come to that area as well. That's one type of customer and they tend to do well because they know what they're getting into. And the other type are developers who are again, aware that they're buying things strictly for the value of the land. They're going to keep maybe the bare essentials of whatever structures were there, but in most cases they'll totally demolish and rebuild.
Speaker: And the plan is to buy something very cheaply and then add value to it by construction of something a bit more massive, right? So you can buy large plots of land in the Japanese countryside, forget about the shack that was built there, tear that down, turn it into again, ski resort, onsen resort, corporate retreat down in the mountains. But those are projects that take a lot more money than the purchase of the land.
Speaker: Understood. So I remember you also used to maybe still deal with this is like buying and selling businesses. Are you still in that space? And do you help foreigners? Let's say I want to own a matcha or something in Fukuoka. Is that something you've done in the past or maybe this is a Nippon bridge question.
Speaker: It is an epon bridge question. And yes, we do it. So we're currently helping one person do exactly that. He's still in the research phase. He's looked at a few businesses. Now he's focusing down on a cosmetics. One of the
Speaker: then expanding with exporting overseas. We have people looking at restaurants and cafes, but no one that's pulled the trigger yet. It's a similar question to who should be investing in those. It should be people with at least the required mental bandwidth to be running a business because whatever you'll be buying, it's not going to be passive. You're running a business, even if somebody runs it remotely for you. There are a lot of bottom line decisions to be made on a very regular basis.
Speaker: Understood. Yeah. One of my, in another world dreams, man, I would love to have a Mattia chain and just, I love Mattia. Yeah. And so optimized and so efficient. And I'm just like, wow, this is such a crazy business model. And I don't really understand how they keep things so cheap.
Speaker: You don't want to know how. I don't want to know. Yeah. Let's not talk about that. It's okay. All right. We're going to transition into some spicier questions. These are more personal for you. I think we've talked to, we have a couple of podcasts on real estate and I think there's trends you've mentioned have been really helpful, but we want to get to know you a little bit better here. So we're going to, we're just going to jump straight into it. If you could go back in time and talk to your younger self, what would you tell them? Maybe about real estate, maybe not about real estate.
Speaker: You're actually usually these questions comes with the word limit. Like you can also say one word or three words. It's good that you have unlimited. I probably tell myself to stay the course. You'll be right.
Speaker: You got that answer in five. You didn't, you had them were a limit there. That's funny. All right. It's most right as a teenager or a 20 something year old, you think that you might be doing okay, but there's all these anxieties and people around you are doing totally different things. And you're worried if you know what you're feeling and what you're going through and how you're navigating your way through the world is going to be all right in the future. So I just, yeah, you'd be right. I maybe add that you can't even imagine.
Speaker: the places you'll end up. So don't even worry about anxiety anxiety. Is that a word about the future too much worrying? Yeah. All right. Moving on to the next question then about failure. How has failure or apparent failure set you up for later success? And do you have a favorite failure here?
Speaker: Yeah, I get it's hard to answer because every failure has something in it that I guess you can learn from. So they don't hit me that they obviously hurt every time to get out of them, but they all teach you some things. So I take them as not just necessary, but desired parts of what I'm going through in my life. You real estate related mistakes. We purchased the property thinking that.
Speaker: I know everything because I came from Australia and I've been a landlord for five years so I know everything about rent and tenants and how to manage things and I just took all of those assumptions straight into the Japanese landscape as a lot of our customers tend to do if we don't help them not do it and made a bunch of mistakes like immediately raised the rent on a couple of tenants who at least were expiring without even checking what comparable rents are and without figuring out that they'll immediately move out because there's
Speaker: very many cheaper properties to be had. Purchasing a property on behalf of a customer without dotting enough of the I's and crossing enough of the T's, not recognizing that the property was actually misrepresented in a couple of cases, either by the selling agent or by our own research staffs, just plain errors. But you learn from all of these, right? Like now we know how to deal
Speaker: with tendencies in Japan, now we know how to properly research and double check details and listings and so forth. They've all come in very handy, those mistakes. Great answer. Yeah, that's scary. Not crossing those T's and dotting those I's and realizing maybe a misrepresented property. That's a oh shit moment.
Speaker: I guess the thing to add to it, sorry, the thing, just one thing, the thing to add to it is you can fix and recover from and learn from all of your mistakes and be better for it. As long as you're transparent and accountable about it, right? If you make a mistake and then you try to camouflage it or cover your ass or hide it, then.
Speaker: all of the benefits go out the window. So in our case, when we made a mistake, we recognized we made the mistake to accountably afford it and paid the price. If it was for a customer, we completely refunded them everything that we've charged them in that case, not just to maintain your reputation, but also to make sure that moving forward, you'll remember that very well, right? The pain factor is a big thing.
Speaker: Yeah. That's a good example. Ziv, what are some bad recommendations you hear in this real estate space, especially with foreigners? I don't know about bad because some recommendations are anchored in something very real that might be just suitable for that particular person or that particular company.
Speaker: There are companies that specialize in particular types of properties and are recommending for people to only buy those properties. There are companies that specialize in particular locations and professionals as well that recommend to go only for that location. But to do that by bad mouthing other strategies I think is a bit of a mistake.
Speaker: We, for example, don't recommend to most of our customers to go for central Tokyo properties because the yield are very compressed and returns in other parts of the country can be a lot higher, but we do recognize there are some very safe and stable bets if you're okay living with lower yields.
Speaker: I don't know. I don't know that there are any bad recommendation. I just say anyone that's recommending anything to you that's saying that this is the only way to go and everything else sucks is maybe somebody to not consider, consider not working with. Yeah. Agree. All right, Zev. What are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life?
Speaker: or podcasts. My life. We're talking, we're not focusing specifically on business. Okay. Okay. Illusions by Richard Bach. That was probably the first one that really shook my world. Illusion. We're making our video by Richard Bach. Okay. Okay. I see it. Richard Bach is the one, his most famous book is a Jonathan Livingstone Seagull.
Speaker: which is a very short kind of, they say, I don't know what you call it in English, like a crystal rubbing energy slinging New Age hippie stuff. But his other books go a bit deeper into his philosophy. And yeah, Illusions was one of the best ones that I've read. What else? Business Do by Hiroshi Mikitani. If we're talking business book, it's a very simply written English book because he wrote it in his own English.
Speaker: sheds a lot of light into about running businesses and specifically the Japanese mentality of running businesses, which he tries to claim that he doesn't have, but it's very easy to figure out from the book how Japanese he is beyond even recognizing it. So that was business dough interesting.
Speaker: That was helpful. That could then founder trying to think Lord of the Rings, I think, Lord of the Rings. Yeah. Just for the way it was written. Obviously I read it because I was a fantasy geek all throughout my childhood, but the way that man writes just.
Speaker: put writers on the pedestal for me, something to aspire to. Cool. I know you have a busy day every day. I'm curious, like, how do you structure your day? How do you have so many businesses, so many clients going on? Like, how do you juggle everything? What is, how do you structure your day and what is your routine like?
Speaker: Probably very eclectic compared to what people swear by. I don't have any, no, only meditation, first 10 minutes of the day, never answer emails before 11, finished by, I don't have that. I think maybe if I, can I talk about how I structure my week, which makes it a bit easier for me.
Speaker: Yeah. DJ on Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Yeah, but that's a part of it, right? Like I tried to religiously carve my weekends away and it took me a while to get to that point, but I figured out that as long as I get at least six to eight hours of sleep, seven is usually my sweet spot during the week.
Speaker: And as long as I can completely disconnect and recharge or as close to it as I can get during the weekend, I feel very energized to take on the next week, right? So my days usually start at around 7 30 a .m. bit of housework and then.
Speaker: Straight out work all the way to midnight, usually 11 or midnight with breaks. If I have to go out to meetings and obviously lunch and dinner and stuff like that. Usually when I can, there's going to be an hour of exercise thrown in there in the afternoon. So when my brain starts getting a bit mushy and the weather is at that sweet spot, I'll go jogging. And then if it's not too hot, also do a bit of exercise after that. And then dinner, a bit more housework and right back into work.
Speaker: And then come Friday night, I will completely disconnect from everything but urgent WhatsApp messages. I found that using the using a smartwatch and putting away the smartphone really helps with that because you can triage the really urgent, important notifications and ignore everything else.
Speaker: And what I've been doing in the last couple of years is I do not go into my emails except every two or three days, because that's a rabbit hole that never ends. Just an email strategy. Wow. You work till midnight. I do that sometimes because of the time difference, but that's a good thing. Thank you. I'm glad we learned a little bit more about you personally.
Speaker: and i will not meet customers on the weekend unless like they only have a single day in the city and that's the only day they can meet i will definitely not be answering emails like the weekends are pure pleasure and that works for me everyone's different but yeah cool thanks save thanks for taking the time today i'm glad we got to ask you some of those more personal questions get to know you a little bit better
Speaker: Pleasure as always. And yes, see you all at the summit. Yeah, we'll drop a link. Oh, hang on. Before we go. No, wait. Before we go, you haven't told everyone what you'll be talking about at the summit. Oh, okay. Yeah. So we're excited. We've been, Aquimart's been up and running since January of this year and we've been collecting a lot of really good data. I think one of the big things that we set out is to make sure that we have clean data and being able to slice and dice what insights we're seeing.
Speaker: might not be 100 % accurate, but I don't know if there's any, there's this clean of data outside of in Japan at this point that we have some really interesting data, I think on specifically like how time on market for properties, some areas that are really
Speaker: Hot. Where are our users looking at? What price ranges people are looking at? But also, Joey's been working really hard on a couple of new features. We're excited to share a sneak peek of what's coming to our AcciaMart subscriptions. But Joey, anything else? I think that's the teaser. Yeah. Some new features that we're adding. It's the main ones that other real estate websites have. So it's just bringing us up in line with the.
Speaker: Some of the main features, actually, and some new features too, zoning maps, hazard maps, things like that. So that'll be cool. Alerts, some new features are kind of a couple of the new features we're brainstorming. But yeah, as Taki mentioned, trends we're seeing in the space, we're trying to start leveraging the data that we're collecting on where people are searching to show what's hot in Japan.
Speaker: And that's what you'll be presenting at the summit as well, right? So we get one presentation that's going to be about the data that you've gathered over the year and one that's going to talk about the features and how to get the best out of the platform, right? Yeah, but we'll probably spend half the time talking about one, half the time talking about the other.
Speaker: And the other, yeah, the other workshop is yeah, we've been helping a lot of people with AccuMart and just seeing how people use it. I think we're going to give some demos on how we think we should use the platform and actually do a little bit of user, get some user feedback as well. But if you're new to the AccuMart platform, we're going to do a deep dive at the summit and excited to meet people in the flesh.
Speaker: Excellent stuff. Can't wait to see you all there. Awesome, Ziv. Thank you so much. You're our most requested guest. We got you on for a third time. Hopefully we're looking forward to the fourth time soon. Anytime. Talk to you soon. Thanks guys so much. Take care. Bye.
