Transcript
Speaker: you are coming to a new country and you are going to have an amazing experience and you got to decide how much you want to spend on the things you don't know that are going to cost you time and mistakes that you want to do and that's what versus how much you want to work with somebody who's been through that is it going to help you avoid a lot of those missteps and mistakes and just make things smoother and easier.
Speaker: Welcome to the buying a house in Japan podcast. My name is Taka. Unfortunately, my co -host Joey yet again is missing today. We have a guest to John cross the founder of mail mate. John, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. So John, we've been talking about this for a while. I know we've been trying to get you on the podcast, but finally it is time as we help a lot of clients, help buy achias with our acumen direct program.
Speaker: The question of who is going to set up utilities, who is going to manage utilities and who's going to be tax representative is ever present for us. John, do you mind talking us through MailMate and how you guys solve this problem? Well, who are you first? actually Who am I first?
Speaker: I've been in Japan for about eight years. I came after college. I fell in love with it. I think a lot of people in the audience might resonate with that. There's something very intangible and just you show up, it's a different world. It was an absolute amazing experience. I'm glad I did it. I'm originally born in the US. My parents are American. I grew up in French, Canada, Quebec. Yeah.
Speaker: Actually, at last night's funny. I played ice hockey here in Japan with our local ice hockey. Like, so that was the last we got 2 Canadians. And then the rest is all hit everybody's Japanese. I can't understand the thing. I'm still improving. It's been here 8 years and. The Japanese yeah I can speak a little bit. I didn't actually speak quite a lot. I should say, but it's. it's By actual experience terms, when you're actually in the conversation, in the room with somebody in the business setting, it's just a totally different role when you're at like an Izakaya or something like that. Or you're talking to a friend on the side of the road, but totally. Okay. So eight years in Japan, tell us about mailmates. How'd you start it up? What's mailmate do?
Speaker: MailMe is but started as a virtual mailbox, and ah people are probably familiar with that service in the US. yeah You can receive your mail in a virtual mailbox. People do it if they're traveling. People will register serve their businesses all the time at places like that.
Speaker: um
Speaker: Mail is still very much present in Japan. Paper is a thing. um trying to They talk about going paperless every year. They're like, this year we're going to go paperless. As a whole nation, they talk about it.
Speaker: And it's what, but they said that five years ago. and And they said that five years before that. There's, there's a real appreciation for things that are working in Japan, in the culture. And if it's working, don't mess mess it up. it's It's almost like if the US was the land of righteous chaos, Japan is like.
Speaker: quiet harmony or something more calm. Right. yeah yeah Yeah. So the lots of mail in Japan. So we started receiving mail for folks. We received utility bills, tax notices. They come to us. We'd scan them. We make them available in our app. And over the years, what we found is just, it's not so much that you just want to get your mail. It's actually what you really want is help navigating the nuances of Japan. they And it just happens to be that the mailbox is a great way to do great place to be doing that. Right. So starting a point at least.
Speaker: I mean, you get this like thing in the mail. It's like, you can't read it. We started, that's how we started. And what we've really found is, you know, where we can be really helpful is for folks who want help bridging that gap, like navigating that nuance of Japan. Because, I mean, if you're going through the purchase experience, you've probably experienced it. There's a lot in there. You're just getting started.
Speaker: Your journey is beginning and some of that journey feels like a treasure hunt, so to speak. It's fun, but some of these treasure hunting activities, you might not want to go on once you're actually here and living your life and, or you're not here full time. and You don't want to deal with did my tax notice come in or things like that. So we've found ways to just.
Speaker: support more and more under these foundational key items, such as being a tax representative, which means we also help people remit their taxes because they might not have a local bank account to pay their property taxes once they get the notice in the mail. Utilities are quite similar. I'm going on a super long right here. keep this is yeah This is helpful. japan one of the really One of the things that you come to appreciate Japan over time is it is actually very much governed at the local level.
Speaker: You'll have a national directive or a company -wide directive, but implementation actually, and responsibility, because they take it as, its this is my, like, if Kyushu or Fukuoka is my responsibility, if Sapporo is my responsibility, implementation gets done at the location of the responsibility, at least in my experience and with with with a lot of what we'll see. So you might see very different practices from the same utility, quote unquote, company, in different parts of Japan, right?
Speaker: So if you're in Tokyo, some utility companies might be fine with you not having a Japanese phone number and putting a credit card down. You go out to somewhere more on the countryside and they're expecting a Japanese point of contact. They can call and they they they they they want you to show a Japanese bank account they can withdraw from if they're not getting their funds.
Speaker: It's a patchwork of decisions throughout the country. um And that's where you start running into navigation questions. It's like, they don't know how to speak English. We're not just helping you guys, we're helping the Japanese folks connect to you guys as well. That's actually something that I don't think people realize. People want to do well in Japan, like the Japanese folks want to be helpful, but they don't necessarily know how, because the communication challenges and the cultural differences, and they want to show up too, but they That's not sure where to start. That's a really good point. Yeah. As we help people buy in every prefecture, it's just like v becoming so apparent that everyone in every city does things differently, whether it's being like, you need to have a person on the ground living, like responsible and getting mail and sending it back to, Hey, it can be digital. John, do you guys support all over Japan? Are you just limited to Kyushu or Fukuoka?
Speaker: We're Japan -wide, we have, there's hotbeds, you talk about Hakuba, you talk about somewhere like Niseko, all the way down to and Nagasaki, Kyushu, Okinawa. The postal service is national. And typically and we've never had a case where we, case for this, we've never run into any issues, but tax representation is a real thing. Utility directing to a different location is a real thing. So we actually, we just call up the companies. We were Japanese, we presented as Japanese.
Speaker: And we make sure that anything that you need to be receiving is sent directly to us. So it can be an emergency ban is the short answer, but. Right on. Yeah. so let's Let's actually just go line by line here. So tax representation for anyone who's not deep in the Acia purchase process, you basically need to have a tax representative to receive your property tax bill and be your person on the ground. John, did I say that correctly or there's more nuance to it?
Speaker: Yes, the backdrop here is that there is a there are more and more foreigners coming to Japan. There are people investing in properties, etc. And really what the Japanese government wants is they want to make sure people are paying their taxes. yeah And if you don't live here full time,
Speaker: There's no good question of who do I contact? If I got a have if i need to get a hold of this person, how are they receiving their taxes? So the tax representative is is a role. you You have to file paperwork to become someone to designate yourself as somebody's tax representative or to designate another person. And that person is responsible for receiving any notices, not just like for the municipalities, but if the government is this person isn't paying the taxes, they're going to call us.
Speaker: and And we have that responsibility of making sure that information gets to the end customer. We also hold the responsibility to help and support with payments because, as you can imagine, if you're a and municipality in Japan, you're probably not taking wise transfers. Right.
Speaker: So, you need somebody to bridge that gap and not just help you connect the dots in terms of getting all the information and taking that responsibility with the government as an official role. If you're not living here, if you live here, you don't need it. If you live here and you are full time in your gear, you can be your own tax representative if you want. But if you don't.
Speaker: You need somebody to fill that role, both from just a expectation from the government perspective and from a, actually, if you want to pay your taxes, it's going to be very hard to, if you don't receive the notices and you don't have a way to remit payment. If you have, if you don't have a local bank account, that's actually the real blocker where it's very hard to remit payment. If you're not a local person with a domestic bank account and you need to be a resident to have a bank account here.
Speaker: Did I go, is that too much or am I going to leads to the the stem root reason of I think why people need a partner on the ground and why they need mailmate is john Ken yeah as a, I'm on a tourist visa I bought an Akia can I open a bank account.
Speaker: He's incredibly hard to open a bank account actually. I see, if you live here in your residence, obviously then you can walk up there. There's ways for that. They have pretty strict anti -money laundering laws here in Japan, actually incredibly strict. The story behind that is they used to be incredibly open and talking before my time a little bit. So give me some freedom, but yeah at a time where.
Speaker: They used to be loose. They actually, I think had a lot of money flows that might not have been well tracked going through. And I believe it was actually the US that came down pretty hard on Japan wanting more stringent regulation. Don't quote me on that. Do your own research. But ever since they've like really locked things up and it's super tight. It can take three to six months to open a bank account if you start a company here.
Speaker: yeah show good person It was it there's it so hard. We had to pay so much money to open our damn SMBC account. And it's still, so frustrating that if, if we're logging in after quote unquote bank hours online, we can't see our balance. So out a lot of personal frustrations with the bank account still. I'm trying to get loans here for for like you hear Japan super low interest rates, right? Hey, I'm going to get a loan. I'm going to go buy a house or I'm going to open it here or do Airbnb. Whatnot.
Speaker: My experience from Japan is sometimes things aren't said and aren't in the U S people are very clear. It's no, that's you can't do that. And and then you'd say, how can I creatively in within the rules without breaking any rules, get to that goal here. It's not like that here. Sometimes there's no explicit, no, but they let you go through the process. They let you try. And you just find that you're climbing this mountain that has no end.
Speaker: But it has no end for a reason. Like somebody like myself, the banking industry has certain things that they will and will will not do. And they might be explicit or they might not be explicitly stated to me when I'm here. um Understood. So backtracking a little bit here, if you're mentally looking at a flow chart right here, if you are buying Acia and you are not a resident and do not have a bank account,
Speaker: You will need someone on the ground like John or MailMate to be your tax representative. That's number one. So John, you guys would be paying, transferring like the request, maybe digitally via mail or email being like, Hey, John, or sorry. Hey, customer, you owe this much money. How does that work? The MailMate essentially is a mailbox. So you're getting your mail digitally. The mail comes in and.
Speaker: I think a differentiation, and why we've been excited to be supportive about this work whereas other folks they might do it like an agent might feel like they have to do it because they they're introducing a property but they don't necessarily really want that work. And the reason is.
Speaker: For us, we scan it, you can view your own mail in your app, you get an email that the mail arrived, you log in, you check your mail. If it's a bill, like a tax bill, you can then just pay it in the platform, right? If you click pay, we get a notice, we know we're supposed to go pay it, we go pay it, we email you back, say, we've paid your bill and we charge your credit card. Awesome. So we're a little like, we're taking out that I need to call my agent or the person I met for two hours at the easy to coyote session representing me.
Speaker: and make it do all this data. go It's just, it's all on the platform. It's in your hands. You don't have to talk to us to do it. Yeah. For anyone not familiar with Japanese kind of processes, this is huge. John, you're bringing a lot of what we see here in the United States on like online payment to Japan. So you you guys are heroes at mailmate first off. Okay. So it starts at mail though. Next up, let's talk about utilities. So I've purchased a Nokia and I'm like, how do I, I don't have a bank account. How do I set up utilities? How do I tar keep the lights on and how do I pay these?
Speaker: There's a gradient of how far you wanna go and how you wanna get the service set up. If you are gonna spend some time on the ground and you wanna go on an adventure and you have somebody locally who will call the utilities and set them up for you and help you through that whole process of organizing in Japanese to walk through that, and you wanna point at them to your virtual address with us, totally works. That's a self -done,
Speaker: A lot of people choose to do that if they're here anyways, or if they have a Japanese spouse or maybe they they have a family member who's Japanese or lives on the ground. We get parents in the US whose kid has moved to Japan five years ago and they want to now spend more time here. That totally works. We'll go and we'll call and we'll help you set it up if you want, right? Cause a lot of people might not have that. They need that local person to to to actually coordinate, make things happen. We request the statement of important matters.
Speaker: Okay, and that actually has a lot of information and we can look at that and. From there, we we know, okay, we got to contact this region. we We look for the utilities. We find the right utility company. We call them up. We work straight gas requires somebody on premise. Right, but electricity and water usually don't. um The.
Speaker: Last piece here, which we will also do is if a utility company wants us to, wants a local representative, we will do that as a service. And that can be handy. We'll get calls, I want to say four or five calls from utilities a day, trying to get ahold of their customer about some random thing that's not working or we need this to be signed XYZ, do that. And that's, that, that, that service, that that's a more white glove experience that a lot of folks opt for, it to be honest. They just want to sit in and forget it.
Speaker: Yep. Yeah. And you mentioned this earlier, some of our agents are willing to do this setup, but I wouldn't say they are specifically hungry or specialized or like they just do it and and deal with it when it comes up. It sounds like you guys are, this is your specialty. I love it you guys you guys day every day, day in and day out, deal with utilities companies, right? Yes. there it Yes. Yeah. It's funny.
Speaker: I didn't like, like or when we first started and we started seeing appetite for this, we saw agents did it. So we weren't sure like we didn't, is this actually helpful or not? And what we found is that a lot of like more and more agents, when they find out about us, they they're like, oh yeah, talk to milk. Exactly. They're, they're just like, they're, I think. they're kind happy Absolutely. They just don't have the infrastructure you guys have, especially like credit card payments. We have our, we have a couple of properties ourselves. We have our agents and we just top them up. We actually have a bank and account now. So we're transferring over there, but to my understanding agents like to do this sometimes just from the relationship perspective. Like if you want to buy a house again, 10 years from now, you'd probably go back with them because they're helping you with the utilities, not because they're making money off of it or they enjoy it, I believe. No, absolutely. The, I'd say for us too, it's definitely work, but we see it as an investment in help. Once someone is helping somebody get set up and be successful with their mail, we can then do what we do really well, which is a technology platform where you can receive your mail. I'm actually super excited. In a few weeks, we're going to be launching. There's a lot of new technology out there.
Speaker: That's really cool. People are experiencing it with JSPT, et cetera. But just bringing that experience into the app, you really should be able to have a conversation and write in your dashboard about what this mail item is. And what is it important? Is it not? And then you should be able to contact support and be like, Hey, this is what I'm hearing here. I'm actually still not sure. Can you have a look and call the pension office for me? Here's on the mail that you received. Do you translate it for folks? So if I get something from, is it, do you guys like scanning and can you make it a PDF that is translatable or is it just a straight like JPEG?
Speaker: So we scan it to PDF. You can download it directly if you wanted to download it and read it into any Google translation or whatnot. We provide English summaries at the top. Yeah. Awesome. Those are good, but people want more. And obviously it's not, it's difficult for a human to go in and translate every piece. So that's where we're super excited to start having some of this large language model work actually directly in the app, because really you want to be able to click summarize this in more detail.
Speaker: and get like a paragraph instead of two or three line items. So absolutely. Okay. So we're trying to work that, um, that I got my mail, but I don't understand gap. Okay. yeah so Yep. Yep. I'm in that. Okay. Utility set up so you guys can set it up. You can keep going ongoing utilities, which is awesome. I, as a user or customer can pay via credit card continually, right? Yep. We're all credit card auto payments. Do you guys have that kind of stuff set up as well?
Speaker: Yes. I will say if you're receiving mail, there might be something important. So please check. I think some folks, I'm i'm guilty of this too. is If you own a property, there might be something important in the mail. So please make sure and check it. the Set it and forget it. We have auto pay up to San Juan, which is about 200 bucks. So if you have the auto pay button on, actually that's what I recommend. Auto open and auto pay. That just ensures that if a bill comes in, it gets open right away. It gets paid automatically. a automatically For larger bills, because we will support people on some of our plans, we're very specific about what we don't, we we're not a bill processing company. We're really a bill pay support for property owners platforms. If you have insurance coming in and you want to pay your premium through us, we will support that. If you need us to, we'll chart well essentially help.
Speaker: you transact by charging your card and remitting over to the provider. Same thing for management fees. for We get a lot of people who say, i want I'm um hiring a management company to manage my Airbnb. They only take local bank transfer. I'd like to pay for, through you guys. We'll bank transfer, for make bank transfer and charge your credit card on a plan. I'm rambling a little bit. That's awesome. So any payment, are there any payments in Japan you cannot do on the behalf of an owner who's abroad?
Speaker: we We will not pay individuals, that we cannot do. And we're very fussy about that. We also are careful if we start getting into larger sums. If we don't know what the bill is, we have to be able to look at the bill and say, I know what this is. This is Tokyo Marine Insurance. This makes sense. If we look at the bill and it's XYZ company and looks, but it needs to be legitimate, right? It needs to be legitimate. And we need to be able to validate that, which is really easy for run of the mill items. We're not helping with, how should I say,
Speaker: If you hired a company to do something and we don't know what that is, that's not where we are able to support payments. We're able to support with like, we recognize the vendor. It's a common vendor. It's a utility company that's popular. We know what we're doing. Okay. Understood. Um, so who'd I pay a contractor via your guy's service? If they were a Japanese contractor in a local company,
Speaker: And it's a company, there should be no issue. Again, if it's a couple hundred bucks, like a management company, that's easy. If it's, but we we'll probably call them and verify and make sure they're real. If you're starting to try and move 10 grand at a time, that's probably not, you wouldn't want to do it for us anyways, because you know, by the time you're processing your credit card fees on that, et cetera, where we're like, hmm.
Speaker: and Understood. Okay. What's going on here? Yeah. So you guys can set up gas, water, electric. What about internet? I know we've had conversations about internet companies being pretty tough to herd, I'd say. So what's can you set up internet anywhere in Japan? Yes.
Speaker: Okay. Yes. Now, like somebody, you're going to get that one person in the middle of nowhere. There's just no line. We've not had a case yet. What we differentiate on is we provide, we're able to connect up fiber optic high speed in it.
Speaker: We go for 10 gigabytes per second for everyone. There are, there's a variation in location in terms of, I think we were looking at a location in Hakone recently and it really, they'll support up to one gigabyte per second, which is actually pretty fast. Yes. It's plenty of working remote, all that stuff. But so that's really where the differentiation is. Yeah. The, if you want to run down that lane a little bit, it's internet providers in Japan. They're very Japanese.
Speaker: They are you talk there. There's some other options to like Starlink and things like that, which might work for some folks. One, they might not be well set up support foreigners who don't speak Japanese. So there's there's that end that's going on. So we act as a liaison. we We're essentially we we deal with all the communication. We deal with the plans. We deal with essentially being that layer on top. We're really.
Speaker: connecting with the foreigners and then connecting back to the vendor on the back end. Got it. We also provide, we de -risk it for them because they're like, these foreigners show up and then they like, don't pay. Whereas we're able to have a conversation with the foreigners say, Hey, this is to your contract. We, this is what it takes. We're we're better able to manage expectations, I would say.
Speaker: understood. I think something that differentiates mailmate compared to other companies in Japan is like, you guys have a definitely a can do attitude versus the can't do attitude. So hats off to you first off. Um, we've dealt with a couple renovation companies who have just been like, Nope, can't do that. Not our thing. Uh, John, I know we've, we chatted a lot over the past couple of months and it seems like you're pretty down to try for whatever people need. Is that correct?
Speaker: putting you on the spot here. You are nailing something. So like you're speaking to something that's so, mean you're based out of the US. I have this,
Speaker: i want i in in Japanese you call them a senpai, but this older entrepreneur who taught me a lot and he was recollecting some of his earlier experiences. He was working in Germany and one of his vendors were one of the people he was doing workforce that I like you and I like working with you because you have the American can do attitude. There you go, John. That's you. And there is a cultural piece to this in Japan, where you you don't really take on things you don't know you can take responsibility for it ahead of time. Whereas there's ah this more entrepreneurial background a little bit with folks like you and I that are, well, like let let's take a swing at it. let's let's Let's try. And I think our foreign customers are much more understanding of that.
Speaker: Then they are like a Japanese customer. If you say you can do it, they're really expecting you to be able to do it. Whereas if a foreign customer is, can you do this? You can say, yeah, absolutely. let's well And if there's, we'll, we'll go give it a try. We haven't done it before, but we'll go do it. Yeah. So I think there's just some cultural differences there. Nail mate can do attitude, right? Can do it drives my team crazy. Like the the Japanese folks on our team are really good to put up with some of the i'm gonna give you a rapid fire can do can't do type it oh no okay all right john could you guys organize snow clearing if I needed like a regular snow clearing service that's something up your guys alley. Yes.
Speaker: is a short answer. The nuanced answer is that as we do, I would call it in the Kia hotline, where if you need extra services, we have people on the ground who do want to think of it as a specialized commercial assistance service. The way we go about that is we contact locals and find the right provider in Japanese and coordinate. So short answer is yes, longer answer is you got to be in an area where somebody will actually do that.
Speaker: But absolutely. Deep cleaning of the property before we get there. Can you organize cleaners? Same thing. We've actually done that quite a few times. The biggest blocker we run into this stuff is just we're bridging that gap between a Japanese approach and a foreign customer.
Speaker: so We want pictures. Let's say this, we need pictures of before and after the work, for example. And once you start getting to that, like it doesn't work for everybody. Cause you talk about before I've ever been there, we need to be able to show pictures to the company who's going to go and clean it. They take a picture after there. The short answer is we'll go for it. It works.
Speaker: Your willingness to work with us and meet the Japanese box and the expectations and just give us what we're being asked for from the vendors, even if it's like a little odd or not, well why can't you just go straight? Your willingness to go through that is what really enables us to do our job on that study.
Speaker: Um, my garden is overgrown. I need trees cut down and gardening services. something Yes. Same thing. And again, we're finding you the right folks on the ground for your location for this ah garage has giant cracks in the concrete. This is like stuff like that. Can you help with again?
Speaker: Yes. where so I don't know if.
Speaker: I want to differentiate where we're experts from where we're being lubricants to connect you with an expert. okay okay Are we a construction firm that knows how to fix that stuff? That's not my background. you If you know what you're doing, and absolutely. But i just again, if if we're if you're renovating, yeah you know it might be better on some of this stuff at some point is to find the Japanese company that's decided I want to serve foreigners, I'm going to be able to speak English, et cetera.
Speaker: But you guys are willing to be that starting point. If I'm let's say I bought a Nokia, I only know you. I, John, I need help with that. Like most things you guys are willing to start at least we're willing to attempt and we, and what we do is we charge for a time.
Speaker: Okay. Understood. but We get a lot of requests, so we reserve it only for people who are customers at MailMate and for whom we're doing property set up for. it We, that that's important to us because it's not, it's just not manageable. ah People need help all over the country for the stuff. And they're like two hours here, three hours, three years later. That's, we do it for our customers. Understood. Okay. So going back to you, what do you guys feel like you're experts in? What's the bread and butter of MailMate? Digital mail. That's clear.
Speaker: Digital mail. And it's a little more than that. It's almost like it's facilitation. It's on the ground facilitation is really like we you are your rails once you land. I'm trying to think of the right analogy. And I was thinking this the other day, if you were going to cook an omelet where you're sticky pan. If you don't want it, we're going to help you not make a mess you didn't necessarily need to make.
Speaker: yeah And then go from there. It's a journey and it's not meant to, you're going to a foreign country. It's not supposed to be all, you're going to run into these little nooks and crannies. And that's part of the experience. Yep. So we draw a lot of parallels with our business. So with our Accumart direct program, we try to be like the easy mode button. We're not the cheapest. We're not the most expensive. And we're just trying to be like, Hey, we're willing to try to help you find a property or buy a property anywhere, any price point.
Speaker: And just we'll give it a shot. And it seems like there's a lot of parallels with you guys. I think from a team perspective and cost its perspective, I know you guys are a little bit more expensive than the bootstrapped one man operations, but how big is your team at this point? I remember you said a number before I was really impressed. Well, we're eight total the, and, uh, I think I, I.
Speaker: Talked a little bit earlier are actually like our full time scanning that we have to do because we're receiving all this mail. And then we've extra support we give in terms of our foreign customers. And then we've built a platform. So we've a little bit of engineering there as well. So that's not all direct pay. I'm calling up providers, but that's, that's about the whole thing.
Speaker: I think Joey and I, we did this the hard way. I wish we had worked with you guys earlier. I think many people would do the same from a cost perspective. It's let's go there. Let's try to figure out ourselves. Let's find local contacts. And we would just hit barrier after barrier with just like that no can do attitude. ah Now you actually need the mail with this in order to register a car and like stuff like that. So I think John, it's for those who are correct me if I'm wrong.
Speaker: For those who want that just easy mode button, don't need to worry about navigating the Japanese friction. You guys are willing to do that. Absolutely. And we try to beat people where they're at. Like I said, some people would set up their own utilities and point them to their mail -in address. And we do all the way to the full service. Hey, I want my utilities set up. I want internet set up and i I want my tax representation taken care of. I just, I don't want to look at it all. When something comes in the mail, I'll hit pay.
Speaker: um We get that range and we try to meet people where they're at in their purchase process. Right on. So I guess, John, we've we've talked about this and this is something we're rolling out soon, an Accia mate package. This is a collaboration with Mailmate and Accia mate. We're still working on pricing details, but John, you might give me quick overview. What's this Accia mate package look like? You guys, so it's actually really credit to you guys. You, I think by virtue of one,
Speaker: working with a lot of different people. You've created a streamline where you guys take on some of this. We're we're trying to figure out who our customer is early on and getting all the info and all that. So um I think a lot of the credit goes to you guys actually making our life a little bit easier on that. So we're it makes total sense to do. It's ah custom only for your customers. and you know That was the deal. So if you buy through a QMART and you want to work with us,
Speaker: well I mean, it could be as simple as connecting directly with the agents. You don't need to provide all the documentation, all that stuff. So it's, you're going through this process already and you're going to have to do a similar process in the sense of ID provisioning and things like that. So where we can, we're going to work with you to try to remove some of that duplication and hopefully.
Speaker: Set people up for success. All right, John, we just bought a property in Nagasaki. Mailmate is going to be our provider of utilities here. i've just We're customer zero here. So for folks hearing for this for the first time, we are using Mailmate ourselves to go through the process. John, we just connected you with Mika. We're closing on Thursday here. What kind of stuff do you need from us? I know you guys have like a KYC process. What does that process look like from an onboarding perspective?
Speaker: To do the setup work well and to avoid back and forth, we always ask for the statement ah statement of important matters. And we'll also ask for the Tokyo. So those are the registration documents or or the deed, so to speak. With that, we're able to set up utilities without really ever running into many issues. And then we're also able to do the tax representation filing between those two documents.
Speaker: Those we can start right away with anybody for us to actually start receiving mail for you at an address and processing any potential payments. There is Japan has their anti money money laundering act, which we work really very deliberate and following.
Speaker: And for that, we need two IDs, including one with a physical address. And we verify that ID by mailing a physical item to the address on that ID. Yes. Damn. Okay. So that we just we're working with some Shiho Shoshis, some judicial scriveners on this power attorney, and they have to mail you a physical item to verify your address, right?
Speaker: It it's interesting. There's some parallel items and it's funny. It's like the payment space is now overlapped with your property purchase when you're where youre so so there's just dang different ones. So we we do have to do that and we're very stringent about that because
Speaker: Part of the reason we've been successful is we take it on ourselves to be good community members here. And we'll really let that be transparent to whether it's the tax office or anything. Yeah. We take that very seriously. We have, we always make sure we complete the ID check. Boom. Okay. So that's step one. Our Akiyama direct agents will connect directly with mail mate. If you guys choose to move forward with John again, John at the very last question for you, what, as a customer, why should I choose mail mate? Give me the cell.
Speaker: You're, you got you are coming to a new country, and you are going to have an amazing experience. And you got to decide how much you want to spend on the things you don't know that are going to cost you time and mistakes.
Speaker: that you want to do. And that's what versus how much you want to work with somebody who's been through that is it going to help you avoid a lot of those mistakes and mistakes and just make things smoother and easier. So wherever you are on that spectrum, that's really what you got to decide. Do you want to go it alone? That works. That's it's a great way to do it. I did it when I was 23 and showed up here.
Speaker: If you are buying property, not going to be here full time, and maybe that's not what you want to spend your time or resources on, then I recommend going with the provider. And if not us, definitely get somebody. All right, John, take my money. where Please make it easy for us. We've been through our struggles. John, very lastly, where can people find or reach out to you?
Speaker: If you sign up at mail me, it's you log in, uh, you get an account on the app and, uh, we have our Calendly up there. We talked to everybody. That's really more of a compliance item. We just make sure we know everybody. Okay. We'll put yuy that you in the description. We will be hopefully partnering very closely, but John, thank you so much. I look forward to seeing you soon in Japan. Thank you. Bye.
