Chapter 5 — Why nobody replies, and what a buyer's agent changes
The wall
You did everything right.
You found SUUMO. You ran it through Google Translate. You spent three evenings narrowing four hundred listings down to six. You found a machiya in Nishijin with a small garden, priced at ¥28,000,000, and you filled in the enquiry form with a message you wrote carefully in English and then again in translated Japanese.
Nothing came back.
You tried two more. One replied eleven days later with a single line saying the property was no longer available. The other never replied at all.
At this point most people conclude that the Japanese property market is closed to them. It isn't. But what happened to you is real, it is common, and it has specific causes worth understanding — because once you understand them, the problem turns out to be solvable.
Why the enquiry goes unanswered
It helps to know who is on the other end of that form.
Japan has around 130,000 licensed real estate agencies — more than twice the number of convenience stores in the country. And over eighty per cent of them employ fewer than five people.
Sources: 令和6年度末 宅建業者と宅地建物取引士の統計, 不動産適正取引推進機構; convenience store count, 日本フランチャイズチェーン協会.
That statistic is the whole explanation.
The agency listing that machiya is probably a small office. Two or three staff. They handle sales, rentals, and property management for a few neighbourhoods. The person who reads your enquiry is the same person who will show the property, draft the contract, and coordinate with the judicial scrivener on settlement day. They are not a sales department. They are one busy person with a full desk.
Now consider what your enquiry looks like from that desk.
It arrives in a language they cannot work in. Not just the message — the entire transaction. Contracts and the Important Matters Explanation are conducted in Japanese, and the agent is legally responsible for explaining those documents so that the buyer genuinely understands them. An agent who cannot conduct that explanation in your language is being asked to take on a legal duty they cannot discharge.
And the fee does not move. This is the part that is easy to miss. Serving a foreign buyer means translation, interpretation, and hours of explanation that a domestic sale does not require — but brokerage commission is capped by law and cannot be raised to reflect any of it. The agent is being asked to do materially more work for exactly the same money.
Declining to reply is, from their position, the cautious choice. It is not the generous one, but it is rational.
It carries unknown risk. The agent has no way to assess whether you can actually complete. Are you in Japan? Can you attend settlement? Do you have a Japanese bank account? Can you send ¥28,000,000 across a border, and how long will that take? Do you understand that the building has no valid re-build permission? Every one of these is a question they would need to work through before they know whether your enquiry is worth an hour of their time — and they get enquiries like yours often enough that working through them all is not free.
It offers no reassurance. A domestic buyer arrives with implicit credentials — a Japanese address, a mobile number, often an introduction. You arrive as an email address.
None of this is hostility. Very few Japanese agents are unwilling to sell to foreign buyers, and there is no legal barrier of any kind. What you are hitting is not prejudice. It is friction, and friction is what a small business avoids when it already has enough to do.
The part almost nobody explains
Here is the thing that changes the picture, and it is the reason this chapter exists.
In Japan, the buyer pays their own brokerage fee. This is not optional, it is not unusual, and it is not something you can avoid by dealing directly with the listing agent.
If you have bought property in the UK, Australia or the United States, you already know how it works there. What matters is the one difference: in those markets, engaging someone to represent you as a buyer is money you would not otherwise have spent. A buying agent in London, a buyer's advocate in Sydney — each is a line item added on top.
Japan is the exception. Not because representation is free — it isn't — but because the fee exists whether you use it or not.
How it actually works here
Japanese brokerage commission is capped by law. For a property above ¥8,000,000, the maximum a broker may charge one party is:
3% of the sale price + ¥60,000 + 10% consumption tax
Below ¥8,000,000, a special rule applies. Since 1 July 2024, brokers handling property priced at ¥8,000,000 or less (excluding tax) may charge up to ¥300,000 + 10% consumption tax — ¥330,000 from each side, even where the standard formula would produce less.
This came out of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism's programme for tackling Japan's vacant-house problem, announced in June 2024. The reasoning was straightforward: under the old formula, brokering a ¥3,000,000 country house earned an agent ¥99,000 for the same site visits, title searches and legal disclosure work that a ¥50,000,000 house requires. Agents simply declined the work, and cheap rural houses sat unsold. Raising the ceiling was intended to make them worth handling.
Two things worth knowing. Despite the name — teiren na akiya tō, "low-priced vacant houses" — the property does not have to be vacant; occupied houses under ¥8,000,000 qualify too. And the broker must explain the special rate and obtain your agreement in advance. In practice nearly every agent charges the full ¥330,000, so if you are looking at akiya in the ¥2,000,000–5,000,000 range, budget on that figure rather than 3% of the price.
The critical point is in the phrase one party. This is a cap per side, not per transaction. The seller pays up to that amount to their broker. The buyer pays up to that amount to their broker. Two separate fees, arising from two separate agreements.
On our ¥28,000,000 machiya, the buyer's side is:
¥28,000,000 × 3% = ¥840,000 + ¥60,000 = ¥900,000 + 10% consumption tax = ¥990,000
That is what you will pay. The question this chapter is really about is who you will be paying it to.
The two doors
When you find a property in Japan, you have exactly two ways in.
Door one — go to the listing agent directly.
You contact the agency named on the listing. If they take you on, they now represent both sides. In Japanese this is ryōte — literally "both hands." They collect a fee from the seller and a fee from you.
Your cost: ¥990,000.
Door two — bring your own agent.
You engage a broker to act for you. They contact the listing agent on your behalf, arrange the viewing, negotiate on your instructions, and take you through to settlement. The listing agent collects their fee from the seller. Your agent collects theirs from you.
Your cost: ¥990,000.
The number is identical.
This is the most important paragraph in this chapter. Going direct to the listing agent does not save the fee, reduce it, or earn you a discount. It simply means the seller's representative collects from both sides.
To be clear, this is not free representation. You are paying ¥990,000 either way. But unlike in the UK, Australia or the US, you are not paying extra to have someone on your side. You are choosing where an unavoidable fee lands.
What you give up behind door one
An agent representing both parties has a structural problem, and it does not require anyone to behave badly for it to hurt you.
Suppose the asking price is ¥28,000,000 and you would like to offer ¥25,500,000. Under door one, the person carrying that offer to the seller is the same person whose fee rises with the sale price, who was appointed by the seller, who will keep working in that neighbourhood long after your transaction closes, and whose reputation with local sellers depends on delivering good outcomes for sellers.
Suppose the survey turns up settlement in the foundations. Under door one, the person explaining how serious that is, and whether it justifies renegotiating or walking away, is the person who does not get paid if you walk away.
Suppose you ask the question every foreign buyer should ask — is this actually a good price for this street? Under door one, you are asking the seller's representative to tell you their client's property is overpriced.
I want to be careful here. Ryōte is legal in Japan, it is extremely common, and a great many agents handle it with genuine integrity. The point is not that these agents are dishonest. The point is that you are paying a full fee for advice from someone who is structurally not on your side, when the same fee could buy you advice from someone who is.
What a buyer's agent actually does
Not an abstraction — the specific work.
They get the reply. This is the immediate, practical value, and for most foreign buyers it is the one that matters on day one. A licensed Japanese broker contacting another licensed Japanese broker is a routine professional call. No language barrier, no unknown buyer, no unfamiliar risk. The enquiry that sat unanswered for eleven days gets answered the same afternoon.
They tell you what the listing does not. Whether the property can legally be rebuilt. Whether the road frontage meets the two-metre requirement. Whether the boundaries are confirmed. Whether there is a private road burden. Whether the building predates the 1981 seismic standard. Whether the neighbourhood is in a landslide caution zone. Some of this is on the listing in language you cannot read; some is not on the listing at all and has to be checked at the city office.
They translate the Important Matters Explanation. Before you sign anything, a licensed agent must read you a document called the jūyō jikō setsumeisho — every legal restriction, every infrastructure detail, every known defect. It runs to dozens of pages. It is delivered orally, in Japanese, and it is the single most important document in the transaction. Chapter 8 covers it properly. For now: you need someone whose job is to make sure you understood it, not someone whose job is to get it signed.
They negotiate as your representative. Price, timing, what stays and what goes, who pays for what.
They make the transaction possible from abroad. Power of attorney, signature certification if you have no inkan, coordinating the judicial scrivener, timing an international transfer so the money lands on settlement day. Chapter 9 goes through this in detail. It is a solved problem, but only if someone in Japan is solving it.
They stay after the keys. Utilities, tax filings, a management company if you are not living there, the first winter's frozen pipe at two in the morning.
Choosing one
You should choose carefully, and you should not take my word for any of this. Two things to check.
The licence. Every legitimate broker holds a takken licence and must display the number. It looks like this:
京都府知事免許（3）第12345号
The bracketed number is the renewal count. Licences renew every five years, so (3) means roughly ten to fifteen years in business. (1) means under five years. It is not a quality score, but it is a fact you can verify — and licence numbers can be checked against the prefectural register.
What they will not do. A broker who tells you everything is straightforward is either inexperienced or selling. Japanese property has real complications, and the ones you need to hear about are the ones that make your particular purchase harder.
Where this leaves you
You now know three things that most foreign buyers never find out.
You can search for properties yourself, and Chapter 4 showed you how.
Your enquiries are going unanswered for structural reasons that have nothing to do with you personally.
The brokerage fee you will pay is fixed by law and does not change based on which door you walk through — so the only real question is whether the person collecting it is working for you or for the person selling to you.
That last point is the one worth sitting with. Almost every foreign buyer who reaches Japan without representation does so believing they are saving money. They are not saving anything. They are paying full price for the seller's agent.
Next: Chapter 6 — Reading a Japanese property. What the listing tells you, and what it does not.