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Japanese government is selling houses for $500 to populate rural areas

• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• enahs-sf 5y ago
  It would be interesting for the Japanese government to rent some of these properties out short term. I’m sure lots of tourists would be willing to rent them for short periods of time. Although it’s a lot of overhead to facilitate, maybe it would allow for enough revenue to keep the properties maintained and managed.
  • janmo 5y ago
    I don't think Japan is visited by enough tourists for this to work. The article mentions 8.49 million vacant homes.
    • Macha 5y ago
      There's also the question of if these homes are located near where tourists go. If someone's looking to visit Tokyo, they're not going to be interested in staying in Wakayama.
  • eloff 5y ago
    These are not in touristy areas. There would be little to no demand. If you want to stay in small town rural nowhere there is no reason to go all the way to Japan for that.
    • hungryforcodes 5y ago
      Unless of course you like Japan.
      • masklinn 5y ago
        Even if you like japan, unless you like / intend the small-time rural farmer aesthetic. Which I don't think most people who "like" japan really do.
        • quartesixte 5y ago
          as seen by tokyo’s ever growing population, not even sure if native Japanese do either
          • masklinn 5y ago
            Of course not, urbanisation is a thing the world over.
    • dheera 5y ago
      I spent 2 weeks biking around rural Japan, away from touristy areas, and it was fantastic, to say the least. Easy access to Japanese food, small town Japanese aesthetics, and unique landscapes are what made it worth it. Not to mention that even if you want to go to some of the more popular areas of Japan, it's rather easy to get to them from the rural areas with the excellent public transit infrastructure they have, so if you have a job that you can work remotely, and you like the rural daily lifestyle but occasional urban fun and weekend trips to the city, Japan is just about as ideal as a place as you can get to have that lifestyle.
• janmo 5y ago
  There is no mention of how the internet connectivity is.
  • dubcanada 5y ago
    huh? It's not a real estate website. It's a news website. Go look it up for yourself.
    • janmo 5y ago
      I think this is an important point. I would consider living in a remote area, but usually the internet access there goes from very slow to non-existing.
      • vnchr 5y ago
        Coming soon to your farm… StarLink!
      • jacoblambda 5y ago
        If the house is in the few thousand to tens of thousands of USD range, you could probably afford to pay for a fibre run out to your property with the money saved compared to the cost of a house in the US or EU.
      • dubcanada 5y ago
        None of the information has anything to do with a specific location, every single individual house has specific internet options. You can't say, oh all of rural Japan gets 10mbps. Cause every different part has different options. You need to go look at a real estate website that has internet availability information.
      • hocuspocus 5y ago
        This is Japan we're talking about. Remote isn't that remote. Like numpad0 mentioned above, even in the outskirts of small towns, you can typically expect aerial fiber pretty much everywhere, and the actual broadband options will depend on the last few meters.
• Tiktaalik 5y ago
  I wonder how this works in the context of the fact that Japanese houses, unlike those in the rest of the world, supposedly depreciate to $0 in just 25 years. For example will a bank even lend money against such a home or is there some underlying assumption that you'd have to demolish and rebuild new before they'd even consider it? The land is seemingly worth nothing and the building itself worth zero or really a liability.
  • resoluteteeth 5y ago
    > For example will a bank even lend money against such a home or is there some underlying assumption that you'd have to demolish and rebuild new before they'd even consider it? If they're being sold for $500 why would you expect a bank to want to lend money against it? It already has no value as collateral.
    • onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
      LOL - on a 30 year term, too! =PMT(0.02/12, 30*12, -500) $1.85 per month!
    • Tiktaalik 5y ago
      My concern would be that if the land is worth ~$0, and building worth ~$0, that the bank won't even lend you money to build a new building.
      • tormeh 5y ago
        The bank could take collateral in something else than the house. But if you have that kind of collateral, you might not need a loan in the first place...
      • lazide 5y ago
        It can actually be even weirder. The land might be worth -$money (in some cases like Detroit, tax liens and other issues meant the ‘$1 house’ was actually $50k+ because of the liens.) And yes, no sane bank is going to lend against collateral that is fundamentally worthless. Construction loans are problematic because the property can be worth -$$$ if say the work isn’t finished and the builder starts putting (western concept, not sure how it maps to Japan) builders liens on the property for all the work they did, and then it all rots because no one put windows or a roof on it. These properties are at these prices because they are currently fundamentally not worth more. They sit on the market because they won’t even sell at that price.
• city41 5y ago
  Sounds similar to the one euro homes in Italy. At least according to this video, that program seemed pretty successful: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP2vtDLTAgM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP2vtDLTAgM
• eloff 5y ago
  Japan is very difficult to immigrate into, and I'm not sure what foreign ownership of property is like - I'm guessing unfriendly. Someone will likely comment in reply if they know better. These are also very barely within the definition of a house by Western standards. Houses in Japan, especially these ones are less permanent affairs. Poor construction quality, no central heating, etc. This is not a good opportunity for people outside of Japan.
  • aikinai 5y ago
    This is one of those factoids people constantly repeat because it sounds like it would be true. Japan is far easier to immigrate to them most other developed nations, especially the US, which most on this site will be comparing to. Also it’s very easy for anyone to buy property.
    • rsj_hn 5y ago
      When most people say "immigrate", they are not referring to foreign worker status that allows for long term residency, but actual naturalization. Japan has some pretty high bars and the number of naturalized people is quite small -- about 10,000 per year, and these are primarily Koreans of Japanese descent. The high bar is not the "good moral character" bit (which is also required but that is common) but rather financial stability. So if you are from a wealthy nation and a high earner you will be fine, but that is not the typical immigrant profile, and so for this reason there are very few naturalized immigrants in Japan compared to US or other nations that do not have financial stability as a criteria for naturalization.
      • riffraff 5y ago
        > When most people say "immigrate", they are not referring to foreign worker status that allows for long term residency, but actual naturalization. do they? I always thought it referred to long term residency. E.g. I consider myself an immigrant even tho I do not have the citizenship of the country I live in.
        • 5y ago
• 3np 5y ago
  I live in a Japanese small town and have been looking into this, some random thoughts: This keeps getting resensationalized[0], While it varies a lot per region, a lot of these can come with clauses such as making it your residence, doing certain maintenance/reparations/replacement etc. I have been looking around a bit for something like this in the local akiyabanks, but there's just a handful of items on there, most have been there for years and the entry of new ones is really low. Not to say that there hasn't been success, but the reality is that most of these require significant investment and/or dedication to be attractive. There are also other programs, like renting them out rent-free in exchange for maintenance (really, would you invest 100,000s of yen to replace the boiler in exchange for rent on your 6-month notice rental contract?). Still, most empty homes are not part of anything like this and are left to ruin. Anywhere except the bigger cities (and sometimes even there), this has a significant impact on towns. Driving anywhere in a more remote prefecture and you see abandoned houses falling apart pretty much everywhere. It can really be nice living here, though. 0: https://soranews24.com/2015/04/10/so-who-wants-a-free-house-by-the-sea-in-japan/ https://soranews24.com/2015/04/10/so-who-wants-a-free-house-..., https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20191023-what-will-japan-do-with-all-of-its-empty-ghost-homes https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20191023-what-will-japa..., https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/05/asia/japan-vacant-akiya-ghost-homes/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2018/12/05/asia/japan-vacant-akiya-g..., https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japanese-ghost-houses https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japanese-ghost-houses,
  • leoc 5y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwRjO3kHxU4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwRjO3kHxU4 seems to be pretty balanced and informative too.
• aphextron 5y ago
  How's the internet in these towns?
  • trhway 5y ago
    that reminds about the Finland approach - bunch of years ago i read that the government specifically targeted high speed internet expansion into rural/remote areas (in particular the Baltic sea shores which are beautiful to live on) to provide jobs and thus avoid depopulation.
• pmoriarty 5y ago
  There are places in the US which will give you a home for free and some will even pay you to move in as long as you fix it up while you live there.
  • the-dude 5y ago
    So where do I go?
    • WillPostForFood 5y ago
      Free land here: https://www.wideopencountry.com/free-land-in-the-us/ https://www.wideopencountry.com/free-land-in-the-us/ Free or nominally priced homes: https://www.businessinsider.com/where-are-free-homes-cities-cheap-2018-12 https://www.businessinsider.com/where-are-free-homes-cities-...
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• siruncledrew 5y ago
  I wonder how long of a lasting impression this creates? I've seen videos from Japanology on Youtube about rural communities trying to come up with incentives and revitalization measures to varying success. From an outside perspective, it's commendable to see small communities care and try to be creative and "startup-y". At the same time, this also is like the analogy "a solution looking for a problem". Supply exists, but demand does not. For example, across the Rust Belt in the US, probably someone could buy a house for $10k or an entire block of homes for dirt cheap, but it would be rundown and not very much fun to live in a town with more inconveniences than amenities. Unless someone is trying to do the homesteading(?) thing, having a free/cheap house somewhere is only a small part of the equation. Maybe I'm wrong, but I would bet even if someone from a city like San Fran, LA, or NY took a deal to live in (e.g.) rural Missouri in a $500 house, they wouldn't be able to last 2-3 years before going stir-crazy.
  • visualradio 5y ago
    > For example, across the Rust Belt in the US, probably someone could buy a house for $10k or an entire block of homes for dirt cheap In 2021? > Maybe I'm wrong, but I would bet even if someone from a city like San Fran, LA, or NY took a deal to live in (e.g.) rural Missouri in a $500 house, they wouldn't be able to last 2-3 years before going stir-crazy. According to zillow, uninhabitable \ barely habitable wood frame homes requiring substantial repairs still sell for about $30,000 in rural Missouri.
    • walrus01 5y ago
      A while back I did some research related to this, and while I wouldn't want to get into the uninhabitable house part of it, there do appear to be habitable and in fairly good condition 3BD size houses in very rural areas for sale in some small midwest towns in the USA for around $40-50k. If you go look at some small towns in southern IL and set the zillow max price to 50-60k you'll see them. At the very lowest end of the scale I found habitable houses in the 20-30k range in KS, OK and that area in small farming towns that have seen significant post-1960s exodus and population decline. If you have the budget to build your own custom house and do something like an off grid solar setup, there's plenty of places in rural eastern WA state where you can buy 20 or 40 acres for $1k per acre.
• dheera 5y ago
  Okay, so VERY serious question here. Can I, as a citizen/resident of the US, buy one of these $500 houses and keep it as a vacation home for whenever I feel like going to Japan and chilling? That's literally less than 3 days worth of hotel stays at a decent hotel, and it sounds like an excellent deal if there aren't other strings attached.
  • raincom 5y ago
    Do you think these $500 homes are habitable?
  • lhorie 5y ago
    It's probably not as romanticizing as you expect. Watch the beginning of Totoro to get an idea of what an abandoned house in rural Japan looks like (rundown, in the middle of nowhere). Vacation homes anywhere get quite dusty in a mere week, so you'd be looking at a spring cleaning event on every trip (very much like in the movie). Bear in mind also that flight tickets to Japan aren't exactly cheap either; you can get a week worth of hotel stays in the US for the price of the round trip flight from US to Japan.
    • dheera 5y ago
      I mean yes, they aren't cheap, I've been there a couple of times before, but lodging costs in Japan are sky high as well, which is more my intention.
      • lhorie 5y ago
        Well, if your idea of chilling is being away from civilization w/ moderate amounts of physical labor, then rather than acquiring a rural abandoned property, a possibly less committed option with more flexibility for tourism is camping.
    • string 5y ago
      That's funny, I always think of the house in My Neighbour Totoro as probably the most idyllic place I could imagine. I'd swap my place in relatively central London for it in a heartbeat.
• fomine3 5y ago
  A point is that there's almost no way to release owned lands in Japan (except died and not inherited) but taxed. That's part of why some property is released such low price.
• AtomicOrbital 5y ago
  It's very much a global phenomenon ... Above a threshold towns get bigger below that towns depopulate ... Yet with remote work this slows however once satellite internet service becomes pervasive worldwide there will be a mad rush to move to remote locations of natural beauty ... in Columbia there is a beach with a massive snow top mountain which will be an attractive remote work hotspot
• h3rald 5y ago
  Uhm... expensive?! ;) The municipality of Triora, a beautiful historical town now nearly abandoned, very close to the Ligurian coast in Italy, is selling houses as low as 1 (one!) euro, in an attempt to re-populate the area and get someone to invest in restoring the historical landmarks... https://1eurohouses.com/triora-imperia-liguria/ https://1eurohouses.com/triora-imperia-liguria/ Honestly, this is a real bargain considering what this place is like and its historical significance. Granted, you have to commit to restoring the place, but still!