The house is the cheapest part

Used-house closing costs typically run 6 to 10 percent of price. The fixed pieces — judicial scrivener, survey, inspection, travel — do not scale down. On a ¥500,000 house they can exceed the price.

Since 1 July 2024, on land or buildings priced at or under ¥8 million, a licensed broker may lawfully charge up to ¥330,000 including tax from each side. Occupancy status is irrelevant. The ordinary banded formula on a ¥3 million house is about ¥154,000 including tax. The special can more than double that, on both sides of the deal. The cap needs prior agreement in the mediation contract. It is current law, written so cheap vacant houses are worth an agent’s time. The arithmetic is in what to ask before paying for a platform.

Non-residents essentially cannot get a standard Japanese mortgage. Even the foreign-resident products that exist will not finance most akiya. PRESTIA’s published disclosure sets an income floor of ¥10 million and a minimum loan of ¥10 million — more than most akiya cost — and it will not lend on a Building Standards Act violation. A wooden house past its 22-year statutory useful life is appraised near zero, so lending is against land value alone. Cash buyers must self-impose the diligence a lender would have forced.

Article 43 of the Building Standards Act generally requires the site to abut a recognised road for at least two metres. Fail that and you own a house you can repair but never replace. Access over a private road (私道) needs consent from every co-owner, preferably notarised. On an inherited rural lane, several of those owners may be dead and unregistered.

Farmhouses in an urbanization control area (市街化調整区域) often carry a personal occupancy right: only the person granted the original permission, or an heir, may lawfully live there. A non-farmer buyer needs a separate change-of-use permission. If any parcel is farmland, the Agricultural Land Act (農地法) applies. A sale signed before agricultural-committee permission is void. It must be a contract conditional on that permission.

Flood, inland flooding and storm-surge maps have been a required disclosure since 28 August 2020. Landslide zones have been on the Important Matters list since 1995. Open the overlay yourself while you are still choosing, not after you have agreed a price.

Inheritance registration became mandatory on 1 April 2024: three years from knowing both that the inheritance opened and that you acquired the property, with a maximum administrative fine of ¥100,000. Inheritances that opened before that date have a deadline of 31 March 2027. An akiya still registered to a dead owner is not a bargain. It is a title problem the seller must solve before closing.

Boundaries are the other stall. A legal boundary survey (確定測量) typically costs ¥300,000 to ¥1,000,000 and takes one and a half to six months. One neighbour who will not sign stops it. Markers on long-vacant rural land are often missing or displaced. The Legal Affairs Bureau can determine a cadastral boundary without neighbour consent, but that is not the same as settling an ownership dispute.

Since 2018 a broker must say whether they can arrange a building-condition survey (建物状況調査). They do not have to make you commission one. MLIT’s own buyer leaflet is blunt: the survey neither determines the presence of defects nor guarantees their absence. It is visual and non-destructive. Attic and underfloor are visible only through existing hatches. Those are the two places where termite damage is most often found. A house with no hatch cannot be meaningfully inspected where it matters.

Contract non-conformity liability (契約不適合責任) is default law, not mandatory law. Individual sellers of old houses routinely deliver the building as-is (現状有姿) and add a full disclaimer. The two-year floor in Article 40 of the brokerage act applies only when a licensed broker is the seller. Akiya sales are almost always person to person. Civil Code 572 is the one thing they cannot disclaim: facts the seller knew and hid.

English akiya blogs still quote “¥5 to 15 million” as if it were a survey. It is not. The Construction Research Institute’s renovation-cost index put a full detached-house renovation at about ¥12.2 million in 2025, a record. A new wooden house averaged about ¥25.21 million in 2026. A “¥500,000 house that needs ¥8 million of work” is not an outlier. It is below the national full-renovation average.

From 1 April 2025, two-storey wooden houses moved out of the old Article-4 exemption and into the new Category-2 class. MLIT’s own guidance is the citation: a large repair or alteration that touches more than half of any one structural element — wall, column, floor, beam, roof or stair — now needs a building confirmation, with structural and energy documents. A kitchen-only job does not. A full roof replacement does. The construction workforce has fallen about 26 percent since fiscal 2000. Expect longer schedules, not just higher quotes.

The national aggregator lists 1,144 participating municipalities. Only 741 of them have anything posted. The municipality is a matchmaker, not the seller, the surveyor, the guarantor or the lender. Forms are in Japanese. The address is often hidden until you register. The largest renovation grants are usually reserved for buyers who will register residency, live there for five to ten years, and repay the grant if they leave.

The national relocation support payment (地方創生移住支援金) is often sold to foreigners as if it were waiting for them. It is not. It requires five cumulative years in Tokyo’s 23 wards — or commuting from the Tokyo area — inside the previous ten, including the year just gone. Someone arriving from overseas does not qualify. Do not treat a grant as part of the purchase price until you have read the clawback. The wider listing problem is in Japan akiya platforms compared.

A licensed takkenshi must deliver the Important Matters Explanation in person. A Tokyo District Court judgment of 11 March 2021 held that the broker has no duty to provide it in a foreign language. Where the buyer brought their own interpreter, the court said the buyer bears the risk of a bad translation. MLIT’s own international-transactions manual tells brokers to treat the Japanese text as the original and any translation as reference only.

Buying from abroad means a power of attorney the judicial scrivener drafted, plus a signature certificate (署名証明, form 1) and a residence certificate (在留証明) from the same consulate visit. You cannot get a Japanese registered-seal certificate from overseas. An unlicensed “consultant” who arranges viewings and walks you toward a contract is brokering, whatever the website calls itself. That line is in what foreign buyers should watch out for.

A wooden building is valued near zero past roughly 22 years of statutory useful life. Renovation spending is consumption, not equity. The next buyer in a shrinking town is paying for land, or for a demolition. If you cannot name a plausible next owner in this town, you are buying use value. That can be a good purchase. It is a bad investment thesis. The demography behind that sentence is in why Japan will keep making akiya until the 2040s and how Japanese houses depreciate.

Keep every receipt for decades. If you cannot document what you paid, the default acquisition cost at sale is 5 percent of the sale price. A worked filing can turn a modest gain into a tax bill several times larger. Non-resident capital gains are 15.315 percent after five years and 30.63 percent before that — the resident rates you will see quoted include residence tax, which a non-resident does not owe.

A non-resident who skips a municipal tax agent (納税管理人) for fixed-asset tax can be fined. The national-tax equivalent has no such fine, which is why English guides collapse the two. The Bank of Japan filing under FEFTA is due within 20 days of acquisition, with no minimum value, and from 1 April 2026 regardless of purpose. A septic tank in the countryside is ¥50,000 to ¥80,000 a year whether you are in the house or not.

Akiya X is a property qualification engine, not a brokerage. The product exists because the asking price is the one number a foreign buyer can read, and almost none of the deal-killers live in that number.