Many of you living in Japan might be looking for opportunities to stay there, development a business or build an investment portfolio. We have a suggestion for how you might do this. In the main cities of Japan there are a great many 'gaijin houses', i.e. Houses converted into share accommodation. Foreclosed properties subject to lease are perfect for this purpose because you buy the house, renegotiate the lease agreement, and you renovate the house, so its suitable for short term rentals.
Now, the appeal of this suggestion is that I can help you develop a website very cheaply using Filipino programmers who work for my partner. She managed 50 staff at a US call centre in the Philippines, and she is a great project manager. Her team have a range of skills for doing this; sadly no Japanese-speaking skills if you wanted to target this market. You could of course provide the content. The opportunity exists for a person to develop their own string of rental properties, or for some of you to team up. Either way, we are only interested in facilitating the opportunity. We are not business brokers or property agents. Here are examples of the quality of her work - my
website and
another for no more than $1000. She can set up online payment systems, databases, etc.
Gaijin properties rent on a weekly or monthly basis. Some have a better reputation than others. Clearly land leased foreclosed property are great properties for upgrade to rental properties for these purposes because:
1. They are down-market rentals
2. They are well-located properties
3. They are low-cost property entries - both in capital and (land) rental terms
4. They offer surprisingly good protection for renters. You might want to get free legal advise from your local prefectural office to ensure that the protections applying to tenants apply to business operators of land leases. I have no experience with those issues.
I was planning to do this years ago but I broke off from my Japanese GF, so those plans collapsed. If you are interested in sharing a website with multiple property owners, we can set up a website 'brand' for all concerned, and just collect a fee. Either way, we are interested in helping people get into business, make great investment decisions.
Land leased houses can be bought for as little as $10,000. The question is whether your property has sufficient appeal to foreigners to rent on a medium term basis. Clearly foreigners love cheap accommodation in nice places, even if it is rural, and if its in a depopulation zone, it matters little for Japanese people who cannot find work there. So this is a good opportunity if you find the right property, in the right 'depopulation' zone, which foreigners can use their Japan (East) Rail Pass to visit. That is the packaging you can do. I think the Japanese hinterland has a lot of promise for tourism, whether its specialist tour groups like hikers, skiers, kayakers, etc. You can offer greater appeal of course if you lease out such sports equipment. It might be as easy as finding second hand bikes at a recycling depot. That is what I did. Damned good bike too.
