Transcript
Speaker: Welcome back. Woo. We are in Santa Cruz, California for our offsite numbered dose. We got a road caster.
Speaker: with the air horn, so we really leveled up our gear here. What have we done today, actually? We'll make this a Dear Diary series plus kind of like a little sneak peek. T -shirts. We did a lot of T -shirt work today. We're giving out T -shirts, so I'm presenting at the Japan Real Estate Summit hosted by Ziv from Nippon Tradings International featuring Emil.
Speaker: Tracy Blanca and Tom Digo and myself and we're making t -shirts We're doing a quick presentation and we have five quiz questions and we're gonna be giving out some t -shirts there Joey What's this like animal thing we have on our t -shirt? Yeah, we were just looking for cool Designs to put on t -shirt that we would like as well. So this is a kappa I don't know just like a badass kappa is the design we went with it's like I'm like, yeah creature
Speaker: Mythical turtle duck creature. Yeah, it has like a bowl of water on its head and if that dries out it dies But it also like drags children into the river to drown them too. There's like why'd you guys pick that? I don't know. It looks badass Yeah, it's just a kind of cool looking but kapazushi. That's like positive. That's a good. That's a kaiten sushi place Kapabashi is a spot in Tokyo where you can buy knives and stuff soccer apparel brand Yeah, there we go
Speaker: So we're going to be giving out these t -shirts to a couple of folks at the Japan Real Estate Conference as quiz answers. We'll give you a quick preview into that later, but we might sell some of these shirts. We have a couple extra. Thanks for supporting us. If you want a shirt, let us know. We won't charge you too much for them. So we're going to go to this conference. Actually, Joey is going to this conference. I'm unfortunately or fortunately going to Indonesia to surf. So thank you, Joey, for handling.
Speaker: Mahalo. I'll catch some good waves through you, but I will miss you guys. So we'll probably post this right after. We don't want to spoil the insights, but we've been asked to pull up some data from AcuMart. If you guys are listening to us for the first time, this will be a good kind of intro. But if you are listening and familiar with us, we've done a big redesign on the site. So take a look at the video. Probably post this on YouTube, but also on Spotify. We're going to be going through some slides here. Okay. Joey, who are you?
Speaker: Who are we? I'm Joey. This is Take. We've been friends since, uh, we met at ICU in 2010. Take had spent a lot of childhood in Japan. I went to, I did two years of high school in Shizuoka. So we both had a, uh, some background in Japan ourselves. And we've been friends ever since that time at ICU traveled together a little bit. Yeah. Joey, how much Japanese do you speak?
Speaker: Okay. Okay. When I graduated, I would have said business fluent in Japanese. I believe I could have worked at a Japanese company. And yeah, and probably interviewed as well. Okay. I probably at 60 % of that now. Yeah. You lose your Japanese really quickly. I grew up, I'm Japanese Americans and my dad is Japanese. I went to Japanese school as a kid, but absorbed like literally 0%. And I went for like the hanging out with friends to play video games and Pokemon on the side.
Speaker: I'd say I can understand Japanese really well, but I don't have any practice in speaking it. So I don't have that confidence, but reading and listening is okay. So with Google translate, I feel I can get it by, but you don't need to be super, super good at Japanese to buy a place is what we're trying to say. But it is someone asked that on the Instagram account too. Yeah. You don't need to be super fluent. The more, the easier, the easier your time is going to be though.
Speaker: Yeah. And adding on to what Jerry's saying, we were both, we've both been working in tech for maybe the past 10 years out of college. And we had felt some frustration that we couldn't buy a house and where we grew up. So I'm in California living in a mobile home. Jerry's I'm in Canada. I live with my parents right now, quit the job to start a business.
Speaker: Yep. I got laid off. So we both timing worked out really well for us and we put our heads together and we're like, we should just buy a house in Japan. We'd seen all these things on Instagram about cheap houses, Japan, where we first found our interest in these cheap Akiyas. And then ultimately, yeah, it led us to buy a spot back in, we got keys in October, but how do we find that spot, Joey? We started, as Taki mentioned,
Speaker: with the cheap house of Japan Instagram and his awesome newsletter. Great stuff. We would click through to the actual listing pages and Google translate them, convert the yen to dollars and rinse and repeat. And this did get a little bit tiring and the map, the searchability of the map isn't great on these Japanese websites. You have to know area names and train station names and region names ahead of time.
Speaker: So really it's geared towards the Japanese consumer. So we decided to just build our own map, ingest as much data as we could and build something with a more modern experience that would facilitate our own search for property. So we ended up finding our Beppu property on one of the very first iterations of the Akiyama map.
Speaker: Yeah, so similar to what Joey said, we built this for ourselves in short. And we are so used to looking at Zillow or Redfin and really confused when you go to Japanese website, it's like overloads of data and like all these prefections. Like, I don't know where the f all these prefections are, all this stuff, even with Google translate that we're like, this is something we needed for ourselves, but also quickly found out other people were interested in as well.
Speaker: Yep. We released a version one in January. Joey had been working on this. He's a software engineer since back in what may or April. And we just launched version two, two days ago, three days ago. Yeah. When I got here, March, 20 days ago, hit the go button. So what you're seeing right here is our landing page. This is something different than when we had before. Joey, what, what kind of only one or two production bugs on the VT launch actually solved them. You saw them fast too. Not, not bad.
Speaker: We're looking at the landing page here. So we added some nice formatted landing pages just to wrap the website in with a professional look. We have some categories here. We're hoping to expand those later. We've got Kyoto on a budget, warm climate, et cetera. There's a ton of cabins that I'm really excited about. So we're hoping to have a cabin, like Cassie looking ones.
Speaker: Cool. Here's our map. This is, this is my favorite feature. Just the, I think the map or you can zoom out, see a higher level of where everything is. If you're interested in, I'm specifically interested in the islands around Okinawa. So I'm always checking to see what's available. So really easy to pan around. It's modern.
Speaker: real estate, a map experience. Totally. Yeah, we're big surfers. Love to look at what's closest to the ocean. Where can we get as close to a good surf spot? So play around with the map. We have over 300 ,000 listings at this point. I think there's plenty for you to see as you look at the top, there's a whole bunch of filters on price, home type. So we just added condos. We'll talk about that later. You can now filter by square footage. So a lot of big improvements from V1. So really excited with how this look is, how it looks and functions at this point.
Speaker: Okay. This is an example of one of our listings. This is in Shizuoka. Joey has a special place for Shizuoka, right? Yeah. Two years of high school. I've read Shizuoka. It's a beautiful prefecture and I spent a lot of time there in high school. So other improvements we've done here is again, cleaned it up as much. If you compare this to the Japanese listening, it's a very different visual experience. I think one thing that we've recently changed is we were previously Google translating the Japanese listings.
Speaker: verbiage or description. Now Joey has the layered AI on it. Joey talked to us about how'd you do this? Yeah. So if you Google translate a website, you get a very mechanical translation from Google and we were never really too happy with that.
Speaker: The, it feels clunky. So what we did is instead is we take all the information that we have about the listing and we feed that to the AI and we ask it to generate a nice looking paragraph about the home and also about the area as well. And I'm, I read these and I learn new things about the areas all the time. Yep.
Speaker: This request a consultation button, if you haven't already heard, we've done maybe over a hundred consultations since January. We got a lot of traction. So we've talked to a ton of folks. This is meant to help advise people before they contact the Japanese real estate agent. There's a lot of pushback and I think Japanese real estate agents are not used for foreigners being reaching out and we'll typically ignore them. If you are looking at buying request a consultation for us, I think you'll gain the value out of what we charge. Unfortunately, we have to charge a little bit for our time.
Speaker: But we have, I think helped guide the right people in the right direction. We might not be able to be know all the answers, but we can at least point them to the right person or someone who can help what they're trying to do. And to set expectations, opening a bank account in Japan is very difficult and as is starting an Airbnb. So we set appropriate expectations there as well.
Speaker: Cool. What do we got here? Yeah, we've got listings in multiple currencies. So our customers are from all around the world. And as we learned on our own property search, it is tiresome, always checking what is 4 .9 million yen to dollars, et cetera. So we've added euro, pound, yen, Canadian dollar, Aussie dollar, Singapore dollar. It's set up a bunch of different currencies. We've even included crypto there as well. We both worked in crypto, so we decided to include that as well just for fun.
Speaker: So yeah, so you can browse in any currency that you want. And if your currency is listed, let me know and it will be very easy to add it back. Yeah. When you look at these Japanese real estate sites, you see the like the huge million number and what the heck? What is 2 million? And it's just challenging doing the currency exchange. Joey, how do you pull this currency exchange? I know these change a lot, right?
Speaker: Yeah, these are live numbers. So we update them 12 to 24 times a day. Okay, cool. So up to date, hopefully we'll be doing some Bitcoin transactions or seeing some Bitcoin transactions in the future. We are bullish on crypto. All right. In our version 2 redesign, this was one of the biggest things I'd say. We had gotten a lot of feedback that we had only had equal data or detached homes.
Speaker: We have since added condos, which in Japan they call Apato or Manchon, or there's a couple of different ways, but for the American terms, we call it condos. So these are interesting buys, especially for the investor type. Joey, would you invest in a condo?
Speaker: Yes. So the great thing about Conozan Akiemart is if they are being currently rented, we list the yield that you can expect from it. We are working on this. We're working to add new, more information, expected monthly annual returns, net yields. And so that's coming down the pipeline soon.
Speaker: I think they're condos are a great, it's easier than a house in some sense, right? You don't have to maintain your own roof. You don't have to maintain your own property. So potentially it is a bet. And also I feel like sometimes the prices are really good. So it could be an easier end to owning a property in Japan than buying a house. What do you think?
Speaker: Yeah, I think they are cheaper. It's easier to get your feet wet with condo. I wish we went with the condo. We went with the harder way in the beginning, but happy the way we took it the way we did. But these are great opportunities for investors. Again, we've seen yields of like 15 plus percent. But again, you have to calculate the net yield, but really good way. I think especially most times the listing agents will also offer property management services. And if someone's already renting it, you can expect to get that income.
Speaker: Yeah. For example, take Tokyo. If you're looking for something affordable in Tokyo, let's say 30, $40 ,000, unlikely you're going to find a house, but potentially you'll find a condo at that price. Totally. So yeah, take a look at our condos features. We are hopefully trying to put out net yield soon. A lot coming up, but those are some of the biggest changes in our Akiyamart V2 redesign.
Speaker: Okay, here we go. Akiemart Insights. This is mainly for our J -Rep conference or Japan Real Estate Conference, but background, Joey, you're a data scientist, right? Or you were a data scientist, right? Yeah. So after out of school, started my career in data science. I always enjoyed looking at data and we decided to apply that same, or I decided to apply that same interest in data to the data we've been gathering at Akiemart. So we do have a pretty cool database. We have
Speaker: A lot of Japanese listings of pre -owned homes. We're not looking at anything new, but we have pre -owned homes and pre -owned condos, and we have access to the listing description too. So there's some interesting stuff we can do with keyword searches in those listing descriptions.
Speaker: Yeah, our goal is to have a really clean structured data set. I don't know if there's something like that in Japan. I know Zillow and Redfin, some of those guys are keeping track of that historical data, things like that. We don't have that in Japan, but it is something we've thought about. If we could isolate what's a good deal, what's not a good deal, I think that could help our customers decide to buy or not. So let's jump into the insights here.
Speaker: All right. All right. Most liked. This one's a fun one. Easy to understand. Where are people liking properties? And again, these are mostly foreigners that are our customers. So these are the locations of interest for foreigners in Japan. Shizuoka, again, I'm biased, but it's a beautiful prefecture and a lot of nice homes. I've heard that a lot of people are actually moving the number one search spot because I think a lot of people are moving to Shizuoka from Tokyo now or something.
Speaker: Yeah, and it's so pretty close to Tokyo as well. It's beautiful too. Kyoto, obviously not much needs to be said there. Obviously Kyoto. Okayama. Why is Okayama cool? I like Okayama properties too. Yeah, we were initially, before we bought our spot in Bepu, we were looking at a place in Okayama. I think it was like 20k for eight hectares. It was like an entire freaking mountain. Yeah, it came with a whole mountain. Like a river. What's it called? Maniwa, Okayama. So if you're looking for something, that might be a good spot for a lot of land.
Speaker: Yeah, own your own mountain. And most of that land is probably not usable, but that's cool. Cool, though. Next up, we have Hokkaido. Hokkaido is definitely and Nagano both very good snow spots. I think, again, we launched this back in January. So maybe prime time for snow snowboarding trip. Maybe people were in Hokkaido or Nagano like looking at places, but no surprises there because Japan has some of the best snow.
Speaker: And cool cabins too. Again, cabins in Nagano, maybe I bumped this up with my own personal likes, but there's a lot of great affordable cabins in the Nagano area.
Speaker: Okay, real estate hotspots. Joey, how did you figure out what's a hotspot? So I was looking at, I was trying to come up with a metric for basically turnover, where properties entering the market and leaving the market quickest. And no surprise here, number one on the list is Tokyo. And also in that similar vein, number three, number four, number five, these prefectures are all bordering Tokyo as well. So number one, three, four, five, all the greater Tokyo metropolitan area.
Speaker: Prefecture is a lot of movement. Yes Miyagi. What do you know about Miyagi? I don't know. Mr. Miyagi. I honestly don't know much about Miyagi either. It's north of Tokyo, I believe. I think it's Tohoku region. Yeah, honestly, it shows our lack of knowledge here, but they're
Speaker: Properties are moving. All right. Let's take a look at Miyagi after this. Okay. Number three. So proxy deaths at home or Koku Chi Jiko. What the heck is this, Joey? So I get a lot of questions on the Akiemara Instagram. People are like, why is this so cheap? Did someone die here? So I wanted to look into this question.
Speaker: When there's a death on a property in Japan, I believe that there's a legal obligation by the real estate agent to inform the next, the subsequent, the next buyer. I'm not sure if that extends to if the house gets resold after that, but they need to say kokuchijiko on the listing, which means, hey, there's some important information we need to disclose to you.
Speaker: And I was told that nine times out of 10, this means there was a death on the property. So I looked through our database of listings and looked through listing descriptions and counted how many properties had this. And the answer was about 0 .4%. So four in every 1000 homes. That's a lot lower than I thought it would be with all these abandoned homes. But yeah, 0 .4. Interesting.
Speaker: What? So excluding Tokyo, medium price is 150K USD. What does this mean?
Speaker: So I wanted to just get a rough understanding of prices, some of the very high level helicopter tour of what the prices actually look like in Japan. Again, we are looking at secondhand homes. We are not including new builds at all. And this, these, this, the following data does not include condos actually. So these are secondhand detached homes, median price, excluding Tokyo for all of Japan, 150 K. Okay. Interesting. Excluding Tokyo. Let's see. Next slide.
Speaker: Including Tokyo. Whoa, that jumps a lot. Yeah. So including Tokyo, the median price jumps up to 300 K and on the previous slide, it did say 90 % of homes were under 300 K here. We can see that has jumped up to 850 K. So the bulk of properties outside of Tokyo under 300 K inside Tokyo under 850 K interesting spike actually at the 1 million plus, which was not seen on the previous slide, luxury properties in Tokyo. That's where they're at.
Speaker: I'm honestly going to look outside of Tokyo. It's crazy to see how expensive it gets, but I guess one of the things we've heard and have seen is that Tokyo prices in real estate are one of the few places that do not depreciate. I think many of the other prefectures you can expect that your house you buy is not going to be the same value a year later. No surprise there that people are putting their money somewhere safer in Tokyo.
Speaker: All right, let's go. Welcome everybody to the AccuMark quiz. So this was meant for the Japan Real Estate Summit and we're handing out t -shirts there. We've got five questions and again, very similar to the Kokichi Jiko, we're looking through listening descriptions for keywords and then just seeing which prefectures have a lot of those keywords in them.
Speaker: All right, here we go. We have the Aki and Mark quiz.
Speaker: So for example, and again, just some caveats. This is from AcuMart Data. We're looking at keywords. For example, if you Google this, there is probably going to be an objective answer that is different from the one we give, but this is again, based on what we're seeing written in the listing. So potentially the sentiment of the homeowner in Japan when they go to sell their house. Yep. Okay. A winner's win a t -shirt. Sorry. If you're listening to us online, you do not win a t -shirt, but we might be selling these t -shirts pretty soon. So keep an eye out.
Speaker: Okay. I already know the answer. We both know the answer to these. Joey. We'll just talk about it. But first question, what is the rainiest prefecture in Japan? So again, what we did here, we searched for these key words, which prefecture is it showing up the most in? And interesting that people would write these words in the description as well. So it really does show if a specific prefecture, they talk about typhoons a lot, you can probably be sure that typhoons come through there.
Speaker: That is where we bought our house. Bepu, Oita, we had no idea. It was by owner sentiment, one of the radius prefectures in Japan. Other ones, Wakayama. And in fact, I think when I looked at this data, so 6 % of listings in Oita mentioned one of those keywords. And then the next one's down like Wakayama, Ichi. I think they were like maybe 3%. So Oita was noticeably higher than the rest.
Speaker: Yeah. Okay, so the answer's here. Oita.
Speaker: Well, if you like rainy day jazz, consider Oita, Wakayama, or Aichi, but... Do you think Oita has a lot of rain in it? How was your experience? I haven't been there. I don't know. It has a lot of hot springs, so it's nice and like the hot spring with rain vibes is something cool that I'm looking forward to, but it wasn't too rainy when I was there. Yeah. Okay. Number two.
Speaker: Okay, what prefecture has the most beaches in Japan? So keyword search there, beach, sand, surf, ocean, sea, and waves. Joey. Hands, guys. Think tropical. Okay, here we go.
Speaker: Okinawa, yeah, again, this was even more so than the rainy prefectures. Okinawa, I think this was like a whopping 16 % of all listings in Okinawa, mentioned beach, sea, surf, et cetera. And then this dropped down a bunch for the other prefectures.
Speaker: Top three. Okinawa, Shizuoka. Shizuoka has a lot of great beaches. Again, I went to a bunch of these beaches when I was in high school. Nagasaki. Interesting. Although I personally know of Easter egg on Akiyemara. I know of a five thousand dollars front property in Nagasaki. Go find it. Okay. All right. Easter egg. All right. So.
Speaker: Okinawa for beaches surprised me as Aki wasn't on here, but yeah or Chiba. Yep Okay, what prefecture has the most hot springs in Japan and keywords here hot spring and onsen this should be Yeah for all the people who have listened to previous podcasts. Why did we buy in Beppu? We bought because of the onsen That was the right one There we go
Speaker: number one hot springs yep up next shizuoka and nagano both of those make sense so both those are good nagano specifically i remember we we did like an onsen snow trip that was a really nice yeah yeah we have gone on one of those two hakuba where is the
Speaker: The monkeys in the hot springs or the copy bar in the hot springs? It's got to be somewhere around. I don't know if it's Nagano specifically. I think a copy bar would be nice. Okay, what prefecture has the most affordable properties? And what we're doing here is counting the number of listings under 50k? Yep, pretty simple. Just look at all the properties under 50k for each prefecture, add them up.
Speaker: Oh, so when we saw this, we were like, I've never been to any of these prefectures. That's maybe why they're affordable, but at the same time, I'm sure there's, you know, if you're looking for a deal. I could not tell you a fact about any of these prefectures. So I do think that's telling barely know. So Yamaguchi, I think that's right for Fukuoka. I, I, I generally, you know, I've looked at the Akimar map a lot, so I feel like I do generally know where these prefectures are, but yeah, that's maybe telling and not a lot of tourism to these places.
Speaker: Yeah, but at the same time, if you want to avoid tourism and get further away, I would look at these places potentially and getting bang for buck. This could be a good opportunity. And on the, so Wakayama just on the surf front. So one thing that I've been doing is, so Miyazaki has really great surf. So I've been looking at the angle of the Miyazaki coastline in reference to the Pacific ocean. And where else along that Japan, do you see that same angle?
Speaker: And Wakayama has some of those angles. So I do think there could be some good surf in Wakayama at affordable prices. Okay, cool. All right. Which prefecture has the most snow in Japan? Keyword searched? Snow ice ski and snowboard. Yeah. And obviously this is going to be the Northern prefectures. Oh, Toyama coming back. Toyama. Yeah. Strikes again. Interesting.
Speaker: Yeah, so Toyama, Niigata, Yamagata, I would have guessed like more Hokkaido type, but it's actually interesting that, again, people, the listing agents are writing about this in their listing. I don't know what that means. Some snow removal, roof is designed for snow, who knows what they could be writing, but pretty interesting. Actually, when I did, I can't remember which one I was looking at, maybe Typhoon a long time ago when I was collecting this data.
Speaker: I think I did look at what some of the listings looked like that mentioned typhoon, and I think it was stuff like, yeah, something reinforced for typhoon, blah, blah, blah. It is reflective of what people think about in those areas when they're writing a listing. Interesting. So if you're looking for an affordable property, Toyama, if you're looking for a place with snow, Toyama could be correlated. So if you want a snowy cabin, I think Toyama is your spot.
Speaker: bullish on Toyama and also we don't have the data to show it right now, but a while ago we looked at, basically we showed something about most like prefectures. We took those likes and we put them on the map to see if there's any clusters and we don't have the data to show it, but yeah, there was a little cluster around Toyama too. So even though it didn't make the top five list of most like prefectures, there are a lot of people liking Toyama. Okay. Okay.
Speaker: All right, thank you for playing the Akiemark quiz, Joey. The success. Joey is going to be presenting again at the Japan Real Estate Conference. Hey, there we go. We got this. We got this. We are giving this out. We are giving out two months free with this kappa coupon, a kappa 50. It's probably going to be gone by the time you have listened to this, but give it a shot. If it still works, it works. We're giving two months away free to Akiemark Pro.
Speaker: This will allow all listings and yeah, it'll probably be gone again. Check out our logo. That's the kappa and thank you for being here today. Okay. Anything else from you, Joey? Thanks everybody. See you next time. See you next time.
