Y aquí sigo.
3) Second homes owned by wealthy city dwellers who fell in
love with a town or countryside location, bought some
property and built a house, then forgot about it. The best
way to find these places is to drive around your favorite
location and go in and pester the local real estate agents.
Favorite places to find such homes include the Izu
Peninsular, Karuizawa, and in and around Mount Fuji. Now
that several foreign banks are willing to lend against
second homes, this is quite viable as an option. We're told
the key to a bargain is to be persistent with the owner and
wait until they need the money badly enough. With the
economy sputtering along the way it is, you may not have to
wait that long.
You can find akiya all over the country, and particularly
out in the countryside. Trawling the internet has turned up
some quite interesting websites and blogs of foreigners who
have bought into local communities rather cheaply, by
acquiring a disused Japanese ***** house ("Minka") and
fixing it up. Not all the experiences being posted are
positive, but they certainly point to the fact that in the
face of declining populations, many countryside towns would
welcome anyone, even foreigners, into the midst so long as
it means the rejuvenation of their community.
One reason why foreigners are a good fit to solve the
vacant housing problem is that they are more willing to
live in older properties and to perform their own
maintenance. Japanese have been educated over the last 50
years that housing older than 25 years old should be
demolished and rebuilt, leading people to really only want
to buy new places. This writer knows this firsthand, after
a relative bought a countryside property, built a
substantial Japanese-***** post-and-beam house on the land
(and which will last another 50 to 100 years), but being
told by the bank several years ago that the house itself is
now considered to already have zero value....!
Como tercer punto, están las "segundas casas" de gente de cierto dinero que vive en la ciudad, que apenas se utilizan. No son muy fáciles de localizar, pero se pueden encontrar auténticas joyas. Sobre todo, muchos japoneses piensan que una casa de más de 25 años hay que tirarla y reconstruirla.
Algún que otro extranjero compara alguna casa de estas y la renueva, teniendo muchas veces muy buenos resultados.
Añade que los bancos dan un valor de "cero" a estas casas. No te prestan un duro.
So with this in mind, we have been wondering if there isn't
a business in gathering information about akiya, and
setting up some kind of buy-sell-rent exchange center,
where a property manager would handle the details but
owners could find tenants looking for a bargain. There is
in fact such a company doing this, and we met with them
last year, but they told us that the demand by Japanese
themselves for akiya is very low. As a result, although
they are the largest handler of akiya in the nation, they
only have 4,500 dwellings on their books.
Akiya might be in low demand with Japanese right now, but
if the polarization in the economy continues for much
longer, there will be an increasing number of people who
can't be choosy. And then, of course there are the
foreigners. Our imagination quickly conjures up a program
of akiya communities in, say, Kyushu or Sado Island,
serving Chinese and students of other nationalities,
needing somewhere cheap to live while they study Japanese.
We don't know if the locals would be too happy about it,
but we figure they will get over it as the rent money starts to
flow. :-)
El autor de este artículo se pregunta si no se podría hacer alguna empresa
que trabajase con esta información (Nota de Solnaciente: Conocía a Terrie Lloyd en Japón. Se ha arruinado dos veces, ha montado y vendido unas 12 empresas... un tio curioso)
Se supone que según se agrave la crisis, la gente dejará de ser tan "choosy" e irá a las zonas más baratas. Y claro, luego están los extranjeros. Sería posible que se estableciesen comunidades de chinos y estudiantes, dejando volar la imaginación.
Or are property owners just too stubborn to want foreigners
in their midst?
The Japan Times ran an interesting article last week about
an organization called the Japan Property Management
Association, which called a seminar of 170 real estate
agents to discuss how to get more foreigners into the
vacant housing stock of the nation. Indeed, with
foreigners in Japan being the only increasing population
group, it is inevitable that they will be the renters of the
future.
The seminar basically dug up the same old stuff about the
majority (60% according to one survey) of all estate agents
being uncomfortable dealing with foreigners and not being
able to communicate. It appears that the Association is
making vigorous efforts to help overcome the language
barrier and has published guides in four foreign languages
for non-Japanese tenants, spelling out the rules of
tenancy. It is going to take a long while for old
prejudices to be broken down and certainly the problem
isn't just non-Japanese speaking foreigners not knowing
which trash to throw out on which specific day.
In the end, we wonder if the language of cold hard cash
might not overcome that discomfit? This has certainly been
the experience of another moribund area that was
rejuvenated by foreigners moving in -- we speak of
Nisseko. Sooner or later, the financial needs outweigh the
emotive ones: Maslow's hierarchy of needs at work...
La Asociación de Propietarios está montando seminarios para que las
inmobiliarias y los propietarios abran más sus propiedades a los extranjeros, dado que es el único grupo que crece en Japón. Aún así, un 60% dice no encontrarse a gusto negociando o tratando con extranjeros.