Akiya market downplays its money-pit and empty-house backstory

AkiyaMart rebranded earlier this year, as the word akiya can have a negative connotation in Japan and doesn’t quite match the market the property site is serving.

“It brings up images in people’s minds of social decay, economic downturns,” said Joseph Stockermans, one of the site’s co-founders, comparing empty houses in Japan to abandoned buildings in Detroit.

Akiya means “empty house” in Japanese and refers to the millions of unoccupied properties in the country. They are sometimes sold for next to nothing and have become a sensation globally.

Stockermans and Take Kurosawa founded AkiyaMart in 2023 to help foreign buyers navigate the market. The site, which allows users to search for real estate throughout the country and includes an impressive map of the properties, has become a go-to for many house hunters. It also connects buyers with English-speaking agents.

The new name is Mokomoko, which means “puffy” or “fluffy.” Lighthearted branding has replaced a name that leads with a reminder of depopulation and related unpleasantness.

“It’s not a positive thing for people who lived and grew up here, maybe even through the boom years of Japan, to hear foreigners come and talk about how they’re so excited to scoop up cheap akiya properties,” Stockermans said.

Mokomoko bills itself as a Japanese Zillow, referencing the largest property site in the United States. It wants to be a real estate aggregator that caters to English speakers who may find the Japanese buying process opaque and confusing.

Stockermans and Kurosawa found that abandoned properties that cost a few thousand dollars but might set a buyer back six figures in repairs weren’t selling that well anyway. Most of their customers are looking for reasonably priced real estate that won’t become a money pit or a time sink.

“We mostly help vacation home owners at this point,” Stockermans said, noting that the company has seen a particular increase in buyers seeking properties in ski resort areas.

Adam James Smith, a documentary filmmaker based in New York, is this sort of buyer.

Smith became interested in purchasing an akiya after visiting the Japanese countryside while working on projects in China. He searched for a few years — including through AkiyaMart and government-run akiya banks — before applying for a vacation home in Hokuto, Yamanashi Prefecture, directly through a property management company.

Smith ultimately purchased a property that was built as a vacation home. The project still requires major investment — he recently installed a stove and is in discussions to build a parking space — but is far lower-maintenance than some of the other options he viewed.

One property he considered didn’t have a shower or bathtub.

Adam James Smith ended up buying a house in Yamanashi Prefecture that only needed a bit of work. | Adam James Smith

“For someone like me who was only going to be there for a few weeks, maybe a few months at most a year, it wasn’t going to work in that kind of house,” Smith said. The house he ended up buying was previously used as a second home by a couple who lived in Tokyo.

The number of akiya has been increasing since 1993, reaching 9 million in 2023, according to the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. An estimated 13.8% of properties in Japan are empty. About 900,000 homes are now so dilapidated they have no identified use, according to Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism data.

The government has sponsored initiatives to reduce the number of akiya. These include offering guidance for people who inherit an unwanted home from deceased parents, sponsoring rehabilitation projects and running akiya bank databases for prospective buyers.

A plan announced in September tasks the Japan Housing Finance Agency with financing akiya renovation work.

The number of second-home or vacation-home buyers grew from 295,000 in 1988 to a peak of 498,000 in 2003 before dropping to 411,000 in 2008 and remaining relatively stagnant, according to a Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications survey.

The number of second homes or vacation homes was 384,000 in 2023. These second homes are included in akiya statistics in part because they are uninhabited for much of the year.

“During the bubble economy, there were people who became very wealthy and bought vacation homes, but now those people are in their 60s, 70s, or even 80s, and they don’t use those properties very often anymore,” said Ryo Takemoto, a real estate agent at Mokomoko who helps sell homes to foreign buyers.

Takemoto joined Mokomoko after watching an AkiyaMart podcast. From rural Osaka and having witnessed the aging population problem firsthand, he wanted to personally help address the akiya crisis. At Mokomoko, he works with buyers who genuinely want to rehabilitate aging akiya, but he acknowledged that ski resort areas are getting particular attention these days.

Takemoto views foreign interest in rural Japanese properties as a net positive and suggested that around 60% of the residences he sells have been uninhabited for at least a year.

“At the moment, buying property in Japan is quite easy, but I do think there’s a possibility that things could change,” Takemoto said, suggesting that the government could introduce background checks or additional eligibility requirements that make it more difficult for foreign nationals to buy.

Changes to the business manager visa and a crackdown on minpaku short-term rentals have already discouraged some buyers who hoped to turn akiya into Airbnbs.

“If you are living somewhere in the Japanese countryside and there’s an abandoned house next door to you, wouldn’t you rather someone come in and fix it up?” Stockermans said. “We can’t solve the depopulation problem, but we can reduce the friction in helping foreigners buy.”