Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to the Buying a House in Japan podcast. My name's Take. And I'm Joey. And we're two friends who just quit our corporate jobs and bought a cheap house in rural Japan. The goal of this podcast is to document the highs and lows of the process while informing you of every step you need to take in order for you to do it yourself too. We're by no means experts and we're doing this for the first time, but we hope this gives you a realistic expectation if you embark on this journey yourself and we hope you enjoy the show.
Speaker: Are there any headphones out there that make you look more attractive? Yeah, definitely. AirPods Max is.
Speaker: AirPods Max, just thinking for the, you know, if I ever have to work in the office again, just, you know, go, just go for it. 100 % the AirPods Maxes. Look how sleek these look, man. Oh, that's what you have on right now. Okay. Yeah. AirPods Max. I didn't know what an AirPods Max looked like. They pair super well with Mac books. They're pretty good. If you're in the Mac ecosystem, Apple ecosystem. I do want something that I do kind of want to start walking around Bluetooth headphones. Yep. All right. Here we go. We're back. I'm back in Beppu. Joy's back in Beppu. The crew's reunited.
Speaker: Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. We are excited to have a couple updates today. How you feeling, Joey? How's that non -alcoholic beer you're drinking? Yeah, it feels good. Actually, just before we started this episode, I rated it a 4 out of 10. I'm going to walk it up to a 5 out of 10. It's not as bad as I remembered it. Yeah, it's pretty good. 0 .00 % alcohol. A lot of zero. We have a lot of non -alcoholic beers, I think.
Speaker: Japanese culture is a pretty heavy drinking culture. So speaking of which, we'll talk about some updates in a little bit on us taking our contractor out for some drinks. Today on the episode, we're going to go over four different things, starting off with construction updates, giving you quick updates on how our house is looking, things we're learning there. Second, exciting updates with AcciaMart, our search discovery tool we've made.
Speaker: Third, we got interviewed by the Nikkei Shimbun, which is the Nikkei or biggest Japan newspaper. So a lot of cool stuff there. And lastly, we met with a real estate agent today to discuss the selling process and also what to do with maybe buying a couple houses in our area. So I'll pass it over to you, Joey. Give us the construction updates. What's happened since we last spoke?
Speaker: So that was about probably since we last spoke nine days ago. So like maybe a week and a half worth of work. Let me just try to remember back. I feel like a lot more of the floor has been torn up. So in the kitchen is areas getting much smaller, but on the plus side, the Horikotatsu that like sunken table that we're getting put in the living room, it's taken shape. You can like really see how the room is going to look like it's much easier to imagine it now.
Speaker: because of the, a lot of that has been plywooded in. Yeah. I'll put the picture of that kind of, that, that spot as the episode kind of cover. So anyone can look, take a look and also put in another video quite soon of a version 0 .5, I would say of G Soji Lux, but.
Speaker: It's a good feeling, Joey. I came back, I was surprised. Bottom floor looks, it started to take shape. We actually sat in the Hodie Cold Touch and had some coffee and admired some of the open space earlier, I guess last week, even today.
Speaker: Yeah, I will say that construction wise right before we leave, we're going to have to do something about all the furniture upstairs. So that a little bit dreading how to deal with that. So when we're gone, contact is going to come up to the second floor and do a bunch of work as well. But this is where we've been living. So we've got beds, you got a couch, carpets, desk, but you know, a fridge more than you would expect. So, or I don't know. It's like kind of lived in up here. So.
Speaker: We're going to have to move what we came to the shed and then everything else, like, like take the beds apart, kind of consolidate hopefully in one room. And he said he can like, he'll do one room at a time. So he'll just move it when he needs to. Yeah. The bonds, the downstairs is kind of like, I was saying like temple run. We have all these like giant gaping holes in the floor that we have to like jump over to brush our teeth. And it's, it'll be nice to have our first floor done. And we are definitely dreading moving all our furniture down or
Speaker: It's going to suck Jerry, but whatever. Yeah. Also construction. I feel like it's kind of getting driven home a little bit more that when we're gone, it's going to be hard to like do like a real check -in and kind of guide.
Speaker: the contractor kind of in the right direction, I guess, with like finishes and that kind of stuff. Like I do feel being here for the month that he's been working that there's been stuff that, you know, small things here and there that have come up and I'm like, you know, good thing I was here to like kind of catch that or whatever, or like remember to plan that part. Like, I feel like we forgot to plan certain aspects of rooms and they just wanted to like. There's like so many details in a reno, like we really.
Speaker: We're going to have to kind of just like let it happen and not expect perfection because it's, you know, it's impossible for us to be like, Hey, this is the height of this light. It's going to be right here. I guess we could. Yeah, we need to pick out stuff like that, but okay. Yeah. Yeah. Like, like stuff like that. Like I think I did tell him, I was like, okay. And then we want some lights to like come down here, but it's like, you know, it's that kind of stuff. Like, is he going to remember like, he's not going to remember. We don't even remember, you know, but anyways, but
Speaker: Lights are easy to change. We can change stuff by ourselves. I feel very confident.
Speaker: Sorry, I think my mic. No, it's good. We've implemented some check -ins. So Fumi the fixer, our kind of helper down here is going to come in and check every other week. Good news. Joey has finally gotten line access. So we have, they use line here in Japan a lot for group messages. He's been like, dude, it's been like two months and you haven't got it. He finally got it the last week he was here. So we got some, some groups going in line.
Speaker: It's not just me. If you Google the problem I had, there's like a lot of Reddit threads on the, the issue I was facing. So I think a line fixed initiative was affecting. We, whatever we made it. Um, I think some things that are surprising to us right now is the one we actually went down the other day. We saw our walls open and noticed it's gotten really cold here in Beppu and we're like, we have zero insulation. So we like literally just asked the contractor like, Hey, how hard would it be to put in?
Speaker: installation, he's like, ah, no problem. And we're like, what, why did you not suggest that? The things like that, I think it's good that we're here in person, but Joey's been doing a good job. He's been doing talk about your Monday, your routine morning coffee chats with Sato San.
Speaker: Oh yeah, this was like a trick, Takei. Well, not a trick. I mean, it's just like a good way to build like a friendly relationship with the contractor and that's working on your house or whatever. I just like every time he comes over, I make him coffee and like Takei had showed me some podcasts.
Speaker: a humor caffeine related episode where he like talks about how it kind of reinforced, it's like it has some sort of like reinforcing behavior caffeine where you start to, it puts you in a good mood and then you start to associate the good mood with whatever activity you happen to be doing at that time too. So kind of builds a good feeling is the idea when someone has caffeine repeatedly at one spot. So I don't know. I feel like it works on me. Like caffeine definitely puts me in a good mood. So every time Sato -san, the contractor comes over, I'll make coffee, you know, maybe it works.
Speaker: I think he enjoys just the like the time we chat. Definitely works. You guys are buddy buddies, man. I was like, you guys are homies now. I feel like whenever I see you guys talking downstairs, you on the stair with your coffee, Sato -san just like standing up. Yeah. I do feel a little bit like we're homies, so that's a good thing. Yep.
Speaker: And to take it even further, we are going to take our contractor out for drinks on Tuesday. That will be fun. I think, I don't know. I don't know how I feel about this might be a double edged sword, but I do feel like getting closer with him and is only going to help when we're a little further away. Joey, you know, maybe we can, uh, okay. It's going to be good. I think we'll have a lot of fun, but overall.
Speaker: contractor timeline also, it seems like our place originally he was like, it's going to be done in a month. It's not going to be done. It would have already been a month now. We suspect it's not going to be done till estimate. Yeah. End of Feb.
Speaker: Yeah. And so we're planning to come back probably March ish. I'd say to see how it goes, but we have at least set up some checks and balances with our helper Fumi fixer Fumi to fix her to come check it out. And also we've got these line groups going. So, all right, moving on. Good news. Akia Mart updates. Joey, I'll let you take it away.
Speaker: Uh, yes. So I've been doing a lot of work on Nike Mart while Takei was gone and I was here by myself for a bit. What did I get done? I'm trying to remember now. Oh yeah. Okay. So one of the big updates was moved. This was like a maybe under the hood, maybe nobody notices, but under the hood, a real reorganization of how I pull listings to populate the map. And that initially was very slow. If I'm pulling directly from a database now, instead of like a file that I was storing on a CDN.
Speaker: And so initially the problem was that it was a very long load time, but then the map was very fast and responsive. And I kind of made the trade off to a very short initial load time, but the map lost a little bit of responsiveness, but I've been kind of tweaking that since. And, and yeah, that was a pretty cool improvement made on the like engineering side of things. After that, what's coming up next. I mean, if this is your first podcast, you're listening to Akiya Mart, AKI YA dash Mart .com.
Speaker: is the search discovery tool we've made. This is how we found our house. This is how we do feel like this is a useful tool. So it's, Joey's been killing it. It's a full on product, Joey, but yeah, what were you gonna say?
Speaker: Yeah. I don't know. I just fun to talk about some of the engineering points behind it, but yeah, coming up is going to be going to be adding more ways to filter properties. So something, what were we thinking? So adding the addition of properties valued over 200 K is coming up and that's going to be cool.
Speaker: and stuff like, oh, search for properties that have onsen hot springs attached to them. And some of those are going to be released under a subscription product. So that's kind of what we're working towards trying to eventually make a little bit of money with this as like a side business. So subscription product and selling, yeah, selling different ways to basically organize and find properties.
Speaker: So check it out again. We have some featured properties too that makes it a little easier to kind of poke around. I think it was overwhelming how many listings we had initially. We've also added a consultation button. We've been doing a couple consultations just to try to give our tips and tricks. So if you are interested in buying a house in Japan, we love to share what we've learned and see how we can help and hopefully connect you with an intermediary. So.
Speaker: If you see a property you're interested in, click free consultation, book some time with us. Yeah. We're here to learn, learn what you guys want with Akiya Mart, iterate and improve. Totally. So, all right. Mark marketing coming at Akiya Mart coming in hot. Next up, Nikkei update. We were interviewed by the Nikkei Shimbun, which is Japan's, I think like, are they the biggest newspaper here, Joey?
Speaker: they're pretty a
Speaker: So we were interviewed, it was mostly Joey responding, but Joey to 11 out of 10 performance. Joey's incredibly fluent, it feels like now. I think all the interactions over this past month have really been polished. How was that interview for you, Joey? Um, yeah. So the interview was like, I don't know, I'd say 80 % in Japanese. And then like in real difficult spots, I had to switch to English slowly or like we use chat GPT a little bit, but yeah, I thought the interview was a lot of fun.
Speaker: I guess she was very curious about why we had bought the place, why Beppu and a little bit of just like our more recent life story on how we even, you know, decided to do this. Nikkei Shimbun lady, which she said there's going to be 23 million abandoned houses in Japan by 2038, which is one in three houses in the country will be vacant. That's pretty crazy. Ridiculous.
Speaker: I would
Speaker: gone. I don't know. Maybe she went on vacation. I don't know, but just kind of something that's on your mind when you see empty homes here. And then the two on that same corner that are also clearly been abandoned since we've been here. So that's like four homes immediately beside us that are now abandoned.
Speaker: Tell me we should just buy the neighborhood, man. We can rename it. We could be the rulers of this, this hill. I mean, and then we know about the fireplace that we mentioned before. And that man also told me that all the neighbors are planning to sell. So that's like another cluster that like they're all trying to sell as well. So, you know, it's, I, before I would have considered that stat like pretty crazy to hear, but I see it. Yeah. Again, one in 10 people here in Japan is above the age of 80.
Speaker: It's pretty dang high. I don't know what that stat is in the US, but I think Joey and I see it real time. All our neighbors are 80. People are dropping flies. We've only been here for two months and we've literally seen at least two to three houses become abandoned. So it's happening at an accelerating rate and that stat is unfortunately a real thing. What's going to happen? Yeah. Seen it real time.
Speaker: All right. Well, let's see. Yeah. I don't know. I've been proposing to Joey, maybe Aki and Mart domestically. If there's a way, like what we're doing here is actually revitalizing and hopefully occupying these houses. And it's, I don't know. It's kind of a, that's our mission in some sense and to make money and do, do cool stuff.
Speaker: I don't remember. I feel like I asked the Nikkei journalist, I can't remember her name, but I remember, I thought I asked her like, what do you, like, do you think that this is like a problem and like, or no, I think I asked her about solution. I can't remember. I wish I remember what she said. No solution. Yeah, maybe no solution. I guess moving on to the next topic, which kind of
Speaker: is connected is we went to go meet a real estate agent today. We met like a, I think probably Beppu's biggest real estate company. It was a little like, man, it's like what you think of when you think of like Japanese businessmen work kind of area. Everyone had their desk facing forward. Everyone was like dressed up and very serious. What were you feeling Jerry when you walked in? Yeah. Very like generic office kind of vibe is like if you Google, I don't know if you Google office, but like an office from like the nineties, it felt like.
Speaker: Yeah, the intent was to, you know, I think we're trying to network with more real estate agents, not only maybe to promote AccuMR, but also just kind of like figure out, make relationships, figure out what's on the market. This time we specifically went there to explore, there's this one house, another house in our neighborhood that's for sale. We wanted to get a tour of it. What's surprising is they also abandoned.
Speaker: The sign in front of it was saying selling the land. So like kind of eluding that there's no value in the house. It's a, it's like a pretty big house. It's 1970s, 80s house. And we're like, Hey, can we see it? And he was like, ah, we actually don't have the keys to it. Like what?
Speaker: Yeah. That was strange. They didn't have the keys. And he was also like, ah, with these kind of like achias, like we don't usually ask for the keys. Like, you know, most of the time there's just a bunch of junk in there. Like, you know, people are just going to bulldoze the place anyways. And it was like, like, that's kind of like policy, which is interesting too. Like they just really don't care about these old homes. Yeah. We're like, what, aren't you a real estate agent? Like you really don't even want to show the house on it. And it's like.
Speaker: I don't know. Again, a 1980s house in America would not be considered junk. I can consider it. I don't know. They just want to bulldoze it, which seems a little wasteful, but it is what it is, I guess, in Japan.
Speaker: Yeah. I mean, it, it reminds me of something sat satos on the contractor said to me too. I asked him like, what are your impressions of this house? Like, you know, in terms of construction or whatever, just like, what are your general impressions? And I remember him saying like, Oh, it's very simply made. And he like said is simple. And then he like told me like simple in a bad way, like not a good way kind of thing. Like, I don't know, quick construction maybe is a better term. So.
Speaker: Maybe like it was poor construction in its day and it's like poor construction now. And maybe that's why people don't care about these 80s, 1980s, 1970s homes. Yeah. Overall, I think this real estate agent was like very not interested in working with us. I guess not too many people are interested in this like lower price abandoned house space, which I think is also adding to that one in three houses are going to be stay abandoned stat I mentioned earlier. So it's.
Speaker: I don't know how we're going to solve the problem, but these real estate agents who aren't excited to work with us to sell these houses are not helping. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Well, I mean, another fun fact we learned as we talked about the selling process. So we mentioned in the past, we're considering, you know, after we were done remodeling here to list it and maybe flip this property. I think knowing what we know now, I think that our house is awesome, but I think we can level up, Joey. I think we both realized like,
Speaker: Knowing what we know now, I think we could really score a deal, maybe off market deal here in a neighborhood and get bigger space, maybe further from neighbors, things like that. But, uh, high level sales process seems pretty quick. Sounds like we just, we come up with a price. We work with them. It takes about a week to list was what you said. Once we kind of determine our price, um, the real estate agent was kind of just like, ah, hit me up when you guys are ready. Uh, which makes sense. He didn't want to explain it too much, but.
Speaker: The interesting thing was we asked, Hey, do we need a bank account when we sell joy? What was his response? Yeah. He said, excuse me. No, he was like, he was like, we could do cash as well, basically. So the seller, sorry, the buyer will like find literally find that many bills that he needs. I guess maybe take it from, I don't know. Like I don't know if the bank's going to give you like a hundred K worth of bills, maybe, but I
Speaker: The buyer would get that and then they'd like pass it to us. I think he said in like a Kami bukuro, just like he was like in a paper bag, like pass you the cash. Oh man, that would be pretty baller move. So yeah, it sounds like you don't even need a bank, but I guess I, I feel sketch holding that much cash on me. We definitely need to get a fire safe if that ever happens, but interesting. It's a very different process elsewhere in the world.
Speaker: Yeah. And I don't even know, even if you wanted to like, I don't know, find an American bank that might deposit yen, I don't even know if that exists, but like you'd have to bring it into the U S and I know you gotta have to like declare it when it's over $10 ,000 cash or something. So this whole bunch of, what do we do when once we have all this cash? Yeah, we, I guess we got to go through those motions. We got to figure out someday if we want to flip, like how do we.
Speaker: report taxes to Japan. Does it need to be in a Japanese entity? A lot of things to do to be figured out. And we'll report back here, but a little overwhelming now, but at least we know generally that we can sell our house and we could just cash it out in a suitcase or duffel bag of cash. Yeah, but
Speaker: All right, man, it's, it's officially our last week in Bapu until maybe the spring, Joey. I'm headed out on Wednesday night, taking a ferry to Osaka and driving the car back to Tokyo. Joey's headed back to a big Apple for a little bit, but I think we're both back mid March. Oh, it's been a good run, bro. That's for sure. Version two months. I can't believe it's been two months since we got keys, a little under two months. How's the job hunt going?
Speaker: It's time. It's time to get a job. I think we've set the ball in motion or I think we're quite happy with the progress. Even if we're not here, I think something will be happening. We're going to keep on continuing to work on Akiemara and seeing how that happens.
Speaker: Sounds like we need a little bit of a QK or a break in Japanese to re resupply that replenish the funds. That's the way, but, so I'll be looking for jobs. You know, any recruiting jobs here in Japan, in the U S give me a holla. Yeah. Yeah. I'm in the same boat. Probably after Christmas, I get serious about it.
Speaker: In the meantime, if you are listening to this and you know any Japanese bilingual real estate agents we are looking to see and partner, I think there's an opportunity both internationally and domestically for Akiyomark to take off here. It seems like there's enough people interested in these Japanese abandoned homes and
Speaker: And I, after talking to the real estate agent today and hearing kind of some of these stats, like it's a big problem. Like I think if we can find a solution, Joey, and like not waste these, I say pretty, pretty dope houses. They have a lot of character. They're not, they're not unlivable. Like a lot of people say, I think there's a winning solution. If there's a solution there and we find it, I think that'd be a great thing for society.
Speaker: Yeah. I just, as you're speaking, I remember something funny that the journalist said when she was talking, talking about all the abandoned homes. I was like, what kind of, cause I want, I sort of wanted to ask her about crime. Like, does she think crime will increase as abandoned homes increase? But she, and she said like, oh, and like, you know, tests will come into the home. And I was like, yeah, like rats. And she was like, no, you know, she, and I feel like I kind of brought that like a wild boy, you know, she has wild boar.
Speaker: And I think, I feel like I kind of got into that conversation with her like more than once. And I feel like every time she was like, yeah, and wild boars will come into the house. I'm like, this is, I don't know. I feel like I've never heard that sentence before. I was more worried about like rats coming in. She's like, oh, the wild boars are the problem. No, she's talking about bears. She said some bears have killed people here because they've gotten, they started coming. She said that too. Yeah, she said that too. All right, man. We got to save Japan from the wild bears.
Speaker: We got to hold our ground against the bears, the bear worse in Japan. We got to make sure these abandoned homes get filled up and revitalize. You know, she, she know, you know, she, she, all right, man. Well, Hey, that's been a good run on this, this first two months and that boom. Next time we record, I think we'll both be respectively in the United States. So yep. Yep. All right. Catch you later. All right. See ya.
