There are a number of websites that show houses for sale in the countryside that are extremely cheap. I was wondering if in general there is a large amount of affordable housing in rural areas and if yes, why?
https://www.reddit.com/r/japan/comments/vfzkv8/rural_housing_prices_why_so_cheap/
31 comments
Supply and demand.
By 2030 some stats say that up to 15% of properties in Japan will be abandoned.
Much of this comes down to lack of jobs or convenience in rural areas. With the lack of convenience or employment, many families simply don’t accept the inheritance of their parents or grandparents homes. So these properties end up with large unpaid property tax liens and can only be sold at super discounted rates.
I don’t know, but since I’ve been working remote for years from Canada, if Japan ever allowed it, I would happily buy one up and live there, pay my taxes and just enjoy life out there. Japan is such a small country that even “rural” Japan is moderately close to cities and beaches. Rural Canada has a very distant meaning.
This probably seems like a mystery if one is young enough to have grown up with remote work being a thing.
Otherwise, where are you going to work when you live in a cheap house in the middle of nowhere? And even in the modern day, younger people don’t wanna live out there, at least as a group.
1: Practicality. I always get downvoted for pointing this out, Japan devotees often just don’t want to hear the truth, but Japan in general has shit transport.
Tokyo has great transport, some of the other big cities have good transport too.
But most of Japan, including these rural areas with cheap houses? Nothing. Busses are an absolute joke. Trains are at a rate of 1 an hour or in the really remote places even less – and most people live many miles from a station.
Live in these places and you need to get a car to even attempt to live a normal life. Count on lengthy drives to shopping and nowhere to socialise.
2: culture. In a lot of western countries the countryside holds a special place in our culture, whether its the British dream of a country manor, Americans owning half a county in LAND, Swedes with a little cottage by a lake or whatever. Its a dream we all live with and even the not so wealthy aim for lesser versions of this.
In Japan…. This doesn’t really exist. Rather the countryside is just seen as a less good version of the city. If you succeed in life you go up to the city and live as central as you can afford with the balance of what you can get for your money vs location being very skewed toward the latter.
In modern times you do run into people with a different outlook who love the idea of escaping Tokyo and living the small town life but… These people are very much the exception to the norm. And even then they tend to head to certain scenic and not too inaccessible bits of the countryside.
Foreigners can buy properties with cash in most parts of Japan (the exception involves sites important to national security), so buying a country home is easy. Renovations are not too hard either; a few million yen is usually enough.
There are two main obstacles to your dream of living in Japan as a teleworker.
1. The best akiya properties are located deep enough in the mountains to require a car, and that adds vehicle registration and parking headaches to the mix. Of course some properties are near bus stops, but rural buses come maybe three or four times per day.
2. Japan is strongly against granting a visa to anyone who will not be integrated somehow into a community. Students with student visas have a school community. People with spouse visas have a family and usually a childcare and education community as well. People on a work visa have a workplace, customers and coworkers to interact with. If you work remotely for, say, an American company you will basically be living like a vampire, with no positive contribution to the local community except the tax payments.
You COULD buy an akiya as a summer home,
come to Japan on a tourist visa for three months a year, and rent a car for the time you are here. You can also arrange (for a fee) to have a realtor handle your tax obligations while you are away, and even visit the property once or twice a year to air it out, weed the driveway, and check for burglars. I would consider doing this if your property was within a few hours of Tokyo.
remember the guy in the news who accidentally got millions from a town? he was in that town thru some program to rent out a place cheaply.
there are lots of similar places. many people have move out to the city. just imagine being young and you are living in inaka. no prospects, no social life. why stay? so most places like that are full of old people.
“Rural” Sums it all up.
Economics for dummies
A lot of good points made already. Another factor is that older houses in Japan are often of pretty poor quality. There are exceptions, but most things built when Japan was still a relatively poor country (before 1980 roughly) were done with subpar materials with subpar methods.
And then these cheaper houses are mainly those that were inherited after an older person died. The children have no intention of living in them so they didn’t put much into maintenance or renovation in the last decade or two.
And finally many of them have not been lived in for several years, which is not good for a house.
They don’t build houses to last. They expect a house to last 30 years before being torn down.
https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2017/nov/16/japan-reusable-housing-revolution
Jerbs
They are cheap for a reason – most likely built 30-40 years ago so in a pretty bad state. You’d need to sink so much money to make it livable it’d be cheaper to demolish and build new. Plus all the other reasons like lack of decent jobs, inconvenience of living in the middle of nowhere, etc.
Stop wondering, and start buying.
They’re usually impractically located, old, and have been empty for years. They’re not desirable, that’s why they’re cheap.
I live about 15-20 minutes from the station in Osaka, but I can be in the center of Osaka by motorcycle in 35 minutes.
I have a big house, a garage, a grass yard, and live on a hiking trail with a fishing lake.
For as much as I get that 15-20 minute walk is absolutely worth it. I almost never take the train anyways. I’ve probably used it less than 10 times since living here.
1) There’s just not a lot of white-collar work available in the countryside unless you are willing to have a long commute. You can make a living farming, but there’s not a lot of people who want to move out here to do that. Many local governments have training programs and financial aid to encourage people to come here and learn to farm, but even then I don’t think it is an easy transition.
2) As far as people who already live here, a lot of the farming families inherit from their parents. I know SO many couples who built new houses on plots of land that their parents own.
3) A lot of Japanese people work long hours, so they can’t be arsed with dealing with a yard or the maintenance on an old house. So you see all these boring, dystopian aluminum-siding square houses being built all over the place in the countryside these days.. Just soul-less chunks of architecture with a car port and maybe a porch to hang your laundry.
4) Like with cars and anything else, many Japanese people don’t really like buying used things. Not all, of course (otherwise Jimoty wouldn’t be a thing), but a significant number of Japanese people want to buy new.
5) A lot of those cheap old houses you are seeing need a TON of work. Unless you’re of a very rare breed who is totally OK living in an uninsulated wooden tinderbox with tatami that hasn’t been replaced in years and a bathroom that hasn’t been renovated since the 70s, you can basically count on putting an additional $30,000-80,000 into renovations. And then throw in another $30,000 once you start gutting it and find extensive termite damage. (I’m not bitter at all)
6) A lot of those cheap old houses aren’t just in the countryside. They are DEEP in the countryside, sometimes at the ends of very long unmaintained roads. Far from schools, hospitals, grocery stores, parks… usually lacking public sewage and high speed internet.
^ I bought one. I simultaneously regret it and don’t. I recommend anyone who is thinking about buying an 空き家 to seriously do their research first!
Many of the pictures could be old. Also, termites or pests and mold are a problem, especially if the house has been vacant.
Which means most of these houses should be condemned and torn down. Not to mention new earthquake-resistant building designs.
The cost of a new house on a new lot is usually cheaper than trying to renovate.
As a Japanese, I wonder how people living in the countryside in Europe and America make a living.
Is it limited to those who originally live or fire in the countryside?
Really simple, most modern people don’t want to live there. There isn’t much to see or do, there aren’t many jobs, it’s inconvenient to go anyplace. It’s just not that attractive to most people.
Decreasing population & urbanization
People have been moving to cities where the jobs are (and starting families there), the population has been aging, hitting rural communities more (as the replacent babies have been/are being born to parents in cities. Houses end up empty and the kids who inherited them may use them as holiday home for a while, but the grandchildren generally don’t. Plus, Japan has some convoluted inheritence laws (plus taxes) and zoning laws that can make it cheaper to abandon property than keep it or renovate it. I saw an intersting vid on this. I’ll see if I can find it. This, plus what the other comments have mentioned are behind this.
If you’re talking really rural, really cheap houses…
Old, decripid houses that lack modern earthquake protection, no jobs, few shops, and even realiable internet is questionable.
They probably require a huge amount of money in renovation, but with a bad location it will become a sunk investment.
Kinda cheap rural houses are cheaper because commuting is hard or not possible.
Houses don’t appreciate in value in japan, they are like cars..they depreciate. Another reason being so far away from major cities and old structures.
It’s an imbalance between supply and demand.
Supply and demand, the way housing/property taxes work in Japan.
Also, those old houses have shit insulation and probably no central heating/ac.
Pricing is based on availability and desirability. Lots of room to build houses in the country, a lot of people don’t want to live there because rural areas are far from the conveniences of cities. Hence, low prices.
Living in the country in Japan is rather inconvenient compared to city life. Lots of homes aren’t upkept after whoever had lived there passed away. It only takes about 10 years for most of these abandoned properties to completely disappear except a small pile of roof tiles, things that marked a driveway, etc. Got some interesting areas nearby that amazed me at the pace of degredation if untended
I just got back from house hunting for a week in the Japan countryside. Are there lots of cheap houses, but the devil is in the details. Many of the houses are rundown and need tons of work and even after you did all of that work, the house won’t be worth more than the land because that is usually what the price is usually based on and the house wasn’t a very good one to begin with. There are exceptions of course–but mostly crappy houses in disrepair.
Keep in mind that a lot of these articles are sensationalized. They mention houses that can be had for free or at a very low price, but the article includes a picture of a restored Kominka of historic note that probably costs much more.
I disagree with what a lot of the comments are saying about these houses being in the middle of nowhere and small towns lacking conveniences of the big cities. I was mostly looking at at area with a population of 60,000. Nearly all of the modern trappings were there: Starbucks, McDonalds, supermarkets, home centers etc. Public transportation sucks, but nearly everyone drives–which is not hard to imagine if you are from somewhere like Australia or the US.
Because the Japanese don’t like to buy old houses. As far as I understand from what my wife says, the climate is mostly responsible, because the hot and humid summers are particularly awful to houses that have been left vacant for months or even years after the ower died. So it’s very likely that the cheap houses are in a very bad state and require an insane amount of work. It’s probably cheaper to just build a new house in many cases.
Also, the rural population keeps decreasing, because few jobs and most people living there are old. So not a lot of demand and lots of offers.
One of my brothers kept saying he wanted to buy a cheap house in the Japanese countryside. He even spent a month looking for one once. Not strangely enough at all, I never heard of this again after his trip. 😉
Literally zero demand.