Transcript
Speaker: What is up, Joey? Yo, check in this text from Reiko. What's Zillow gone wild? She's saying we should be on a TV show in Japan. Dude, we've been getting hit up for anyone listening. People have been hitting us up about TV shows. I think you were, where were you? You were on a flight and I talked to someone from London. They produced like all these Netflix shows and they're like, hey, we're interested in the Akia kind of UK thing. I was like, oh, okay.
Speaker: Yeah, I remember seeing some email. Yeah, there was some British show Interesting we could have a reality show we should we could pitch this I think we would be fun fact Joey in high school. You're on a TV show, right? Not high school in college in Tokyo. Yeah, I was on TV for three seasons of Shimajiro's kodomo charenji like kids challenge I was like the
Speaker: Like the Steve of Blue's Clues on this TV show. You're the Steve of Blue's Clues? Sick. Yeah, the Japanese Blue's Clues. Yeah. Okay. Cool. I'm dialing in from Lisbon, Portugal. Portugal is dope, man. We should consider moving here too. Could be an option, you know.
Speaker: So anyways, speaking of getting you to move out of Canada, we have put in or in the process of putting in another offer for another Tokyo spot. So the last spot fell through, unfortunately, and we were sticking with it. And we've identified actually our real estate agent identified another spot. We had sent him a couple spots.
Speaker: Just restart the search. And one of the options was he was like, Hey, I found this property west of where you guys were thinking previously. And it's quite a bit far west. But Joey, give us the high level deets of this Tokyo base camp or Tama base camp or whatever we're calling it. We need the, we're missing the air horn.
Speaker: from the road. Yeah, I know. I know. I didn't bring the road cast into Portugal. So next time this probably I've been like just in our conversations back and forth. I've been saying it's technically Tokyo, like it's pretty far west. It's in a Tama city. There's like a big river west, southwest Tokyo, the Tama river and actually our university, not too far from there. I don't know. Still like maybe 30 minute bike ride.
Speaker: So we're like a 30 minute bike ride further west than when we went to university. I'm using bike ride because I don't think there's any direct train lines that go between the university and where this house is. Yeah. Thomas city. It's like this golf, large golf resort type looking area. So definitely suburbs of Tokyo or even not really Tokyo, just technically part of Tokyo as in part of Tokyo prefecture.
Speaker: Yeah, our address is Tokyo, but I think like anyone you ask in Tokyo are going to be like, Oh, you live far away. So we, we've discussed and we'll discuss in a little bit, but 2 .5 hours from Narita.
Speaker: 2 .5 hours from Narita and just like geographically look at a map. Narita sent imagine central Tokyo. We're very far west of central Tokyo. Narita is like Southeast I'd say. So the airport is, yeah, it's a brutal, it's brutal two and a half hours from the airport, but
Speaker: All right, let's start with the pros, actually. Let's not start with the cons. Let's start with the pros. Cool. So pros, first off, price. So this is listed at about 18 million yen, which translates with the current exchange rate to about 115 ,000 US dollars. It's built in 1971. It's 1 ,073 square foot. So this is like 100 square meters, roughly, maybe a little bit more.
Speaker: But the cool part is the land two thousand and six hundred square feet I don't know what this isn't square meters, but it's this is this is a really big spot in Tokyo And I think the biggest pro is it was recently renovated. It just they're just finishing the renovation right now. I Got the square meters here a hundred square meters the building and a hundred forty square meters the land and
Speaker: We get a parking spot. It is a steel frame. This could be like lipstick on a pig, but honestly, Joey and I talked back and forth for a little bit. We already have one Acia renovation project. We're stretched thin. That's dragging on. Yeah. This is a turnkey property in Tokyo for 115K USD. Pretty good.
Speaker: it's
Speaker: For people not familiar with Japanese renovations, it's, and even if you have an owner change property, if you own like a condo unit and then you have a tenant that leaves, Japanese people expect a light renovation, apparently. And the renovations in Japan, I, my personal feelings on them is they're usually pretty cheap. They come with these unit shower, unit kitchens, they call them. It's basically like a drop in place.
Speaker: one and done all in one system. If you've ever been to like a hotel where you have to step up and go into the bathroom and the whole, the entire bathroom is like one enclosed thing.
Speaker: That's what they do when they renovate these homes They drop one of those in and the kitchen unit is very similar thing But just apply to what you need in a kitchen So it looks like when they say that it's been renovated. It looks like new wallpaper new flooring new Unit shower new unit kitchen and maybe just upgraded the lighting isn't the lights that they put on the ceiling not great They put new ones up there. So that's what they mean, but it looks good It looks looks like a brand new house when you're looking at it from the inside
Speaker: Lipstick on a pig. Some of the finishes they use are definitely cheap. But yeah, we just can't handle another project. And we discussed in our last episode, we just really need a home base in Tokyo. No more sleeping on floors or friends' houses.
Speaker: So overall, I think this property has a lot of land and I think the best part, I think one of the deal went deal, not breaker. What's opposite deal breaker. Sorry. I keep thinking of you sleeping on Dimitri's floor. Brutal man. Air mattress deflated throughout the night and I slept on the bed and Tage was just sleeping on a hardwood floor. This is gotta take the steps here. But anyways, we have a garage, which is cool. So this house, if you're trying to imagine, it's like,
Speaker: On a hill or raised up and underneath, there's like a concrete box for a garage. I really liked this place because it's, we only have two neighbors and it's like a big plot of land. It feels like a castle almost where it's elevated by this stone wall. We have this big plot of land. Neighbors are pretty far away. And then we back up to this giant golf course.
Speaker: Yeah, I really like that. Let me try to describe it as well. So if you're on the street level and you look towards the house, there's this very tall stone wall. Maybe it looks like 10, 12 feet high stone wall. And then there's a staircase. You go up the staircase and then you're on this sort of elevated plat plateau type thing. And then the house sits on that. So when you're on the street level and you look at the house, you only see the wall. Maybe you can just see the roof of the house, but, and it's this interesting stonework. So yeah, it really does look like a castle. Like I said,
Speaker: And it does back onto the golf course. There's like a, for it, there's like a tree line in between the golf course and us. But as we've seen at the Beppu property, there's some homes near JLUX in Beppu that back onto this forest park thing. And we're looking at those homes are like, Oh, that's really nice to have the forest in the back there. So this house has that. So that's pretty cool.
Speaker: Yep. So immediately livable, fully renovated. We're still going to do a home inspection to see underneath if there's like things they hid. They put insulation in the roof, not the walls. There's new ACs. Yeah. Like we just, we need this Joey. We can't take another full renovation project. We looked at a couple other properties that are better location, but not livable. And I don't know.
Speaker: Yeah, no full renovation project right now. This will give us a foothold in Tokyo, so we're not sleeping on hardwood floors at friends' houses or in really bad hotels in Kabukicho, but this will allow us to be in Tokyo for longer periods of time and potentially some point in the future look at
Speaker: at actually buying a cheaper house and then renovating it in a more downtown type area. This will give us that home base to launch these operations from. And as Tage mentioned, we've got a garage on this house as well. So we can get a little K truck, which is also really nice. It opens up the rest of Japan for us. She's, we were looking at a property in Shizuoka not too long ago, but really it was like, how are we going to get to Shizuoka flying into Narita? And so this kind of.
Speaker: gives us that foothold in eastern japan tokyo metropolitan area to expand further into tokyo and by like a real run down akya or expands to other places in that sort of general area.
Speaker: Yeah, with our price range of around this hundred K. It's either a shitty place in a good location or a good location. Sorry, shitty place in a good location or a bad location, but nicer place. So I think we're opting for that latter. And to Joey's point, we're going to use this as a home base to hopefully step up to something more central. One of the big things was when we bought our Akia down in Bapu,
Speaker: the car was clutch. We needed the car to get furniture, go around places. We also needed space for Amazon. We sent a ton of stuff Amazon. Some of these Akias that we've seen in the price range in central Tokyo, I don't even know where they put packages. I don't even know if we'd have road access to bring a couch anywhere close by car. So at least this is really simple. And we know this isn't a
Speaker: I wouldn't consider this an A deal, maybe not even a B plus deal, but it's just progressing us in the right spot. And one of the big things that we feel comfortable with is that this is generally a pretty nice spot for around a hundred K. This is Tokyo. We do think it'll appreciate or at least hold its value according to our real estate agent.
Speaker: But we also feel like, I don't know, I think we could do some design changes, make this nice, make this really comfortable and potentially flip it in a couple of years. Yeah. Oh, another pro is the huge yard. There's, they put gravel down. So it's really just like a gravel, a no -scape yard. That's what they call it in Santa Fe, no -scaping.
Speaker: But a very large yard, which just playing around on the Akiemara website, I was looking at, this is when I was looking at Bepu, what makes a property in Bepu worth $300 ,000 versus the $40 ,000 that we bought ours. And most of the time it was yard size. All these homes had a large yard. So that's a good sign, good indicator, I would say to hold value as well is just the amount of land that you get with this property as well.
Speaker: Okay. Time to do some landscaping, Japanese garden, cactus garden, sauna shed. Yeah. I think we are also so freaking close to a golf course. The golf course surrounds us. So I'm not a golfer. I don't think G Joe is either, but time to buy a set of clubs. Yeah. I'm definitely Dan hit some balls. Actually just wanted to make a note, just say something on, you're talking about having the car, like
Speaker: When we were in Beppu, yeah, it was invaluable having boring our friend's car when we first moved down there. That being said, we did learn that places like Nitori, which is a large department furniture store in most major cities in Japan, Nitori does deliver. And that's actually how we got our, no, we picked up the couch anyways.
Speaker: Yeah. And I'm sure you, if you bought a place in Tokyo, I'm sure most stores you go to, you could probably get them to deliver, but it's just like, we must've made a million trips to the hardware store. Hero say, are you going to get them to deliver every little thing? The car just does make it so much easier. That being said, if you don't have a car, I think you can probably still figure it out. So many of these places do deliver.
Speaker: I think a fact, though, is if you are planning to DIY or be more involved in the renovation of your Acia or abandoned home, especially in a central location or anywhere, a car is undoubtedly such a valuable resource, especially a truck or a bigger car, right?
Speaker: Yeah, I was talking people that follow Anton on social media He was saying that I so I met him at this conference I spoke at last two months last month in Tokyo and he was saying that he had just picked up a k -truck as well Yeah, I do think if you're doing real DIY stuff or more hands -on Yeah, you're gonna need a car you're gonna need to transport large bulky items
Speaker: All right. We've talked about the good. I think there's a lot of goods and we're not like, this wasn't like an immediate, yes, smash out of the park. We should offer, put an offer on this property. But we did think about the longer term vision here. So there's some pretty bad, I would say Joey location first off. So we are not super far away, but door to door. I believe on Google maps.
Speaker: We need to take a bus to the station and then we can take a train from the station. There's like a high speed train or a limited express way. Yeah. To Shinjuku. I think door to door it's 49 minutes, I believe. Closer to an hour. Yeah. That's very like ICU. ICU is the name of a college we went to. That's pretty, pretty much in line with ICU. I think that was about 40, 50 minutes to Shinjuku.
Speaker: We can speed things up. So if we get bikes, it's a nine minute bike ride to the station. And then I think like a 29 minute or something like that high speed train. So 38 minutes door to Shinjuku pretty good, but also at the same time, like nobody's going to visit us. Let's be honest. It's going to be really hard to get to our spot.
Speaker: I think we can at least do one pizza party a summer and we can convince people to come visit, but we'll probably have to pick them up from the train station or something. Yeah. One house warming and, but yeah, that's a bad part. There's no.
Speaker: Yeah. Also, I don't know. I don't love having to time the trains like to get to the, that's one thing I like about Japan is you can just show up and a train will come pretty soon, but to have to time it, you watch the schedule and okay. Next express train in 20 minutes. Let me bike to the train station. So I don't miss it. That just, that, that adds for me, that adds another level of stress on top of the, the long commute. Yep.
Speaker: One of my first things when I go to places, I look at the Google maps, like where's the closest ramen? Where's the closest convenience store? We're pretty dang far from stuff. I think it's a 20 minutes, like kind of the closest convenience store by walk, which doesn't seem too bad, but also, uh, it's not great.
Speaker: 40 minutes to grab ice cream, but with bikes. So another flip side, once we get bikes, we are next to all these parks. There seems to be like all these really beautiful biking paths. So on paper doesn't look great, whatever. Like we're, I think we'll have fun either way. And we're looking at this more mid to short term. I, again, I think we could sell this, but those locations, the worst part, right?
Speaker: the
Speaker: for us though to drive door to door from let's say our garage to Shinjuku looking at the map right now 28 minutes that's not too bad if we wanted to drive into the city it's going to be crazy once we get in the city but I wonder how much tolls are so we can drive to the city I think that's a good
Speaker: If we just can't drink note, you cannot have one. You're not allowed to have one beer and drive. So that's D we could do true DD days. I guess as designated driver. Okay. Like the more I think about the locations, fine. I think for what we're getting, like just the feeling of being able to almost immediately move in is worth it versus like us getting a. I'll give that needs work for us to clean it again. I don't have that. I don't have the spirit to do that right now.
Speaker: Yeah. Our next steps, we are doing a home inspection. Our real estate agent is actually going to head there tomorrow or actually Friday to take a look at it. He said some interesting things to us. We were worried like, how competitive is this? He mentioned like for this price range, if someone were to buy this for this amount, they'd probably up level.
Speaker: So he didn't imagine there's going to be too many competitors in the US, like people would be all over this. Yeah. He said something like because it can't be rebuilt or because of its age or for some reason like that, it would be very hard for a Japanese person to get a mortgage on this property.
Speaker: Very likely any buyers for this property are going to need to be cash buyers, regardless of whether they're foreign or Japanese. And so if someone, if a Japanese person has $115 ,000 cash that they're looking to spend on a home,
Speaker: He said very likely they're going to use it as a down payment on a much more expensive home anyways so he did make it sound like this is an interesting sort of sweet spot where the inability for anyone to get a mortgage to buy this property has made the
Speaker: the value, what it is, 115. Maybe it is a very interesting kind of low price zone. Yeah. Another highlight, Japanese people don't like old things. They like to buy new things. So domestically, I think this is less attractive to most folks, us Americans or North Americaners.
Speaker: We love old stuff. I feel like the rest of the world loves old stuff that is refurbished culturally. I don't think a Japanese local would buy this. It probably a foreigner or Chinese person or some, yeah, someone not in Japan, right? Yeah. So he said that the property can't be rebuilt. So that's the reason why a Japanese person couldn't get a mortgage for it. So this specific property.
Speaker: will have low demand and maybe that's why the price is good. I think neighboring homes are probably selling in the, like I didn't check Akiemara, but I think they're in like the 300K range, like around this area. Yeah. He said 40 to 60 million would be a new house and a used house would be 30 or 40. So I think we're getting a deal on this. Let's hope the home inspection comes back positive. I think we're going to try to document this. This is our, I think this is a good opportunity if you're listening to this and
Speaker: You want a turnkey property in Tokyo for a hundred ish K this is going to be our process. And I think, Joey, let's keep the crew update updated here. I think other, if we can do this anyone else can, I believe. Yeah. So let's see. Ultimately, I think we talked about this, Joey, and we mentioned even a couple of times here that we're going to call this, I'm calling it Tokyo home base base camp, Tokyo base camp. What do you think?
Speaker: I like Tokyo base camp, but yeah, we got to figure out what rolls off the tongue better. Like Tokyo base camp is good. Like for our specific purpose, we are using this as a home base or base camp for when we do want to take the next step and buy something more. We have somewhere to come home and sleep. We have a place to store stuff. As a base camp home base, the symbolism is there.
Speaker: Base camp sounds sexier. I would say more, more hardcore base camp. Yeah. Everest base camp, Tokyo base camp. That's what I was saying. Everest base camp. It's probably like a Mount Fuji base camp, whatever the first station is. Fun fact, I was on at Everest base camp when the big earthquake hit. So hopefully a big earthquake hit at Tokyo base camp. Yeah. Do you think?
Speaker: I wonder if they, do we ask Yoshi if they did, if they updated the high sheen, the earthquake standards when they did the renovation? Let's ask him. The interesting thing is like this plot, I feel like this is a really solid foundation spot because of the concrete and where it's located. Again, we haven't seen it in person, but like just from Google earth and what I see, I feel like this is like a pretty rock solid spot.
Speaker: Even if the earthquake does happen, I don't think it's going to hit any other houses around us. So it'd probably be pretty easy to like reconstruct, I imagine. And yeah, that's a good question. We definitely need, I wish they had put installation into, so maybe that's something we do later on.
Speaker: Yeah, I think that we part, part of our interest in this place is it's turned key nature. So I think we, we figure it out as is for now, but yeah, downside. I don't think anyone's going to Airbnb. This is pretty far. I think we could make this maybe until digital nomad monthly rental at some point, it does have four bedrooms. That's pretty big. And it's, if someone wants Japanese life, but not in central Tokyo, this is, I think, actually, if you like to golf too, this is a jackpot.
Speaker: Hey, golf every day. Yeah, golf. We'd have a car, some bikes. You're close enough to Tokyo to go. It looks like there's a little fence in the backyard that backs under the golf. We'll figure that out. Cut a little hole in it. Yeah. I hope we don't golf balls through our windows and stuff. Do you think that's going to happen?
Speaker: No, there's I think enough of the forest will stop the golf balls. Hopefully. Cool. I think Tokyo base camp. Here we go in Thomas city. Very far looks turnkey. We're going to get that home inspection soon. We're going to keep you guys all up to date here. If anyone is interested in probably staying with us at some point, I think we'll probably have this place best case scenario fully up in operational by September.
Speaker: I'm convincing Joey to come to Japan with me. Joey, how are you feeling about that? Want to pick up the keys together here? It would be fun and a business expense as well. So give me a little more time to figure that out. Okay. It'll be a mission. We still got to get it. We still got to get it first. I feel like I'm thinking about plane tickets, but we haven't even put an offer on the house yet. Are we thinking of
Speaker: I don't think we're thinking of low balling on this at all. What are you thinking? I don't think so. I feel like we might've burned a bridge last time. I think it is worth how much it is. From us looking at other properties, I think this is worth what it is. If it's actually true and the home inspection doesn't show any corners they cut. I don't know. If we burned a bridge last time, they were scammers anyways.
Speaker: Okay. Okay. Okay. I hear you. Um, but I think just this land, dude, this is a lot of land, 2 ,500 square feet lot in Tokyo, like buy some nice parks too. Yeah. Buy some nice parks. So my gut is to let's just go out regular. Maybe we, we low ball it a little bit. I was saying, uh, 17 million for 20, 69 zero or whatever, just to keep it spicy.
Speaker: But yeah, let's see. So next steps. It's mid May right now. Our agent said he should be able to get this turned around by mid June. So we're planning to hopefully go end of June to pick up keys. This is expedited because we actually have a Japanese bank account already and set up the pipes. If you're hearing this and you're like, Hey, I can do the same. It will probably take a little longer, but that's right. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker: All our previous efforts, Joey, of getting this stuff set up has finally paid off, hopefully. Yeah. Just what I've noticed for anybody else, you transferring money. So we've used OFX both as a personal account and business account, and the business is much faster. Business account moves money within like a business day or two maybe max, but personal account takes much longer, maybe five, five, six business days.
Speaker: Yep. So, all right, buddy, Tokyo base camp. Hopefully as a go, this is our TBC third or we've looked at a lot of properties now. This is like property number five we've looked at, I'd say, right? Yeah. And I checked out a couple in person too. So.
Speaker: Let's go. Hopefully the start of something cool. If you know anyone in Thomas city that wants to help us out, I think we're, we should look for another fixer type character, Joey. But for now, that's right. Yeah. A lot of work ahead of us. A lot of excited. I'm excited at the core of it. I really thought about it. Toma rivers. Nice. I'm actually on Google street right now looking around Toma river. Nice.
Speaker: Totally. There's infinite amounts of these Akiyas in the area and Tokyo and stuff, but I think life is guiding us towards this one, Jerry. I'd say we just send it. Tokyo base camp. Let's go. All right. TBC. Let's go. TBC, baby. Okay. See ya. See ya.
