This as-told-to essay is based on conversations with Take Kurosawa, 35, and Joey Stockermans, 37, two North Americans who started AkiyaMart, a website designed to help foreigners buy homes in Japan. Since launching in 2023, the site has evolved to not only display listings but also facilitate home purchases. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Take Kurosawa: Our original plan was to make a website to help people search for homes in Japan. But people would start messaging us like, “Hey, I want to buy this property.” We were just like, “We don’t know how to do that.”
So we kind of just started faking it until we made it, to some degree, and putting the pieces together. We realized that we can do this and we understand what the customers want — we understand the friction points in Japan, having gone through the process ourselves so many times.
Joey Stockermans: Now, Take and I — out of the foreigners — are probably in the top 0.1% of people who understand the Japanese real estate process in the English-speaking world.
We know this process almost inside and out at this point. We’ve seen so many deals, and not only seen so many deals, but seen so many complications. And every time there’s a complication, you dig in, and you learn more about the real estate laws in Japan. You learn more about how the process works.
It’s been a lot of work, but I think very rewarding in the sense that we feel very comfortable with the real estate process now.
Kurosawa: About 20% of the people we help are trying to permanently move to Japan because they want to get out of either the US or Europe. Another 50% are looking for vacation homes, and then 30% are looking for investment properties.
We’ve bought more properties in Japan, but our goal isn’t solely to make money
Kurosawa: There was a point in time when we were considering trying to use the properties we own in Japan to make money, but we don’t have any Airbnb licenses yet on any of them.
Stockermans: We’ve only let friends and family stay at our properties before, and we don’t charge them anything. Our focus has really become the website, and that’s where we’re putting our energy.
The properties we own in Japan are really to supplement that, and to market the website — almost like marketing material, where we record our adventure.
Kurosawa: We’ve bought a total of six properties all over Japan. Our goal is to try out the different asset classes: We’ve done short-term rentals, mid-term rentals, long-term rentals. We’re trying to do a land demo, new build. We’ve flipped a property. So it’s just organically happened.
We have our first property, which is in Beppu. We bought one in Tama, which is in Tokyo. That was our most expensive one, around $114,000.
Next, we have Kitakyushu, which we bought for $3,500 and we’re renting it out long term. We’re making about 20% returns on it, which is crazy because we only paid so much for it.
Next, we bought this spot in Myoko, Niigata. Myoko’s really hot right now. It’s probably going to be the next Niseko — it’s like the snow capital. We also bought this for $3,500. We are going to demolish this building and put some tiny homes on it.
Then we bought this property in Nagasaki for $6,500, and we flipped it for $20,000 to a nice couple in California who moved out there with their kids.
Lastly, we bought another property in snow country up in a city called Otaru. We bought this for about $36,000. We’re going to try to flip this. We’re renovating it, getting an Airbnb license, and trying to sell it.
Stockermans: I was very new to purchasing property anywhere in the world — the Beppu house was my first home.
I think we made $4,000 profit on the Nagasaki flip. It was more of an experiment, honestly. The amount of work that we put into it was not worth our time and effort, but we were curious about the selling: how selling works in Japan, whether you can make money off of flips, and if we could leverage our website to help connect buyers and sellers here.
Kurosawa: When we opened up the Nagasaki home for sale on our site, we got 120 applicants within three days.
We didn’t want to come in and be those American bastards who buy and flip and ruin a small town. So we were pretty conscious of who we let into the community. The previous family lived there for 200 years or something like that. So we wanted to be really careful not to just let a random person who’s never been to Japan come here.
Stockermans: A lot of the effort outside of all the logistics of selling the property was vetting those 120 people. This specific town is mostly older retirees. If you put the wrong person in that situation, one, you might be setting that person up for failure themselves, but also, is the community really going to welcome that type of person?
Kurosawa: Obviously, we are developing the business, but I think we have not really indexed on making a ton of money off these properties. We’ve been taking our time with renovations, but it’s been less about making money off these properties and more about spending time in Japan.
We’re exploring more of Japan, and there are still more business opportunities for us
Stockermans: I would say mission accomplished in the sense that we’re spending a lot more time in Japan than I thought we would, and it’s getting more interesting.
Kurosawa: It’s been such a fun journey building this business. I think as we look at these new properties, we’ll start exploring areas in Japan that none of my friends in Japan have ever been.
Kurosawa: We’re starting to help bridge Japanese connections with foreigners. I think the deeper we dive into the tech game, we quickly realized a lot of these Japanese websites — and a lot of Japanese realtors — have no idea how to interact with foreigners. And also, a lot of these owners don’t know how to sell to foreigners.
More people are now coming to us to be like, “Hey, we need your help. We want to sell to foreigners because locals aren’t going to buy this property.”
So we’re uncovering more adventures. I think the big theme is how can we connect Japan to these foreigners, because there’s obviously a lot of friction — and a lot of opportunity, in my mind.
The deeper we go, the more opportunities and things we can build.
Read the full article here
