Chapter 4 — How to search for properties yourself

The market is not hidden

There is a persistent belief among foreign buyers that the good Japanese properties never reach the public market — that everything worth having moves quietly between agents, and that without an insider you are looking at scraps.

This is mostly wrong, and believing it will cost you months.

Japan has a broker-to-broker listing network called REINS. Agents are legally required to register properties on it under most agency agreements, and only licensed brokers can see it. So there is a database you cannot access — that part of the belief is true.

What is not true is that it holds the good stuff. Genuinely off-market property exists, and we do see it. But the overwhelming majority of what is for sale in Japan — well over ninety per cent in our experience — is sitting on a public portal right now, visible to anyone with a browser.

The barrier is not access. It is that everything is in Japanese.

That barrier is much lower than it looks.

Where to look

Four portals cover most of the market. Between them you will see nearly everything.

SUUMO (suumo.jp) — the largest, run by Recruit. Best coverage of urban areas and new-build.

LIFULL HOME'S (homes.co.jp) — comparable scale, often stronger on regional and older stock.

at home (athome.co.jp) — strong with independent local agencies, which matters for rural property.

Nifty Real Estate (myhome.nifty.com) — aggregates listings from the others and from agencies directly. If you only want to look in one place, this is the one. Everything appears together, and it is the easiest of the four to scan quickly.

Individual agencies also run their own sites, and municipal akiya banks list rural vacant houses that never reach commercial portals — worth searching separately if you are looking at the countryside, though the listings are often minimal.

If a property is for sale in a Japanese city, it is almost certainly on at least one of the four.

Making them readable

Use Google Chrome and turn on automatic translation. Right-click anywhere on a Japanese page, choose "Translate to English," and the entire site becomes navigable — menus, filters, listing details.

The translation is imperfect and occasionally comical. It is entirely good enough to search with.

Two practical notes. First, translate the whole page rather than pasting text into a translation tool, because you need the interface translated as well as the content. Second, when you find something you want to look at seriously, switch translation off and copy the original Japanese — you will want the untranslated text if you ask someone to check it.

The vocabulary that matters

You can search effectively knowing about fifteen terms. These are the ones that appear on every listing.

The single most useful of these is 万円. Japanese property prices are quoted in units of ten thousand yen, and misreading this by a factor of ten is the most common beginner error. 500万円 is five million yen, not five hundred million.

Reading the layout code

Japanese layouts are written as a number followed by letters. 3LDK means three rooms plus a combined living, dining and kitchen area. 2DK means two rooms plus a dining-kitchen. S means a service room — usually a room that fails the natural light requirement for a legal bedroom, so 4SLDK is four rooms plus one that cannot officially be called one.

The count excludes bathroom, toilet and entrance hall. It does not tell you room sizes, which are given separately in jō — tatami mats, roughly 1.65 square metres each.

Searching efficiently

A method that works.

Start with area, not price. Japanese portals organise geographically, and prices vary so sharply between neighbouring wards that a nationwide price filter returns noise. Pick a city, pick two or three wards, then filter.

Set the price ceiling higher than your budget. Asking prices in Japan carry more negotiating room than in most markets, particularly for property that has been listed a while. Filtering hard at your exact maximum hides properties you could actually buy.

Do not filter by station distance early. Twenty minutes' walk in a Japanese city is a normal, pleasant, well-served neighbourhood. The filter will exclude large parts of the market for a criterion that may not matter to you.

Save searches and let them run. All three portals will email you new listings matching your criteria. Set this up on day one. Good property in desirable areas moves in days, and the difference between seeing a listing on day one and day ten is usually the difference between viewing it and reading that it is gone.

Watch the same properties over weeks. This is the part most people skip, and it is where the real education is. Note asking prices, then watch what disappears quickly and what sits. After a month you will have a feel for the local market that no amount of reading provides.

What the listing does not tell you

Everything above gets you to a shortlist. It does not get you to a decision, because Japanese listings routinely omit or bury things that determine whether a property is worth buying.

Whether it can be rebuilt. A plot without at least two metres of frontage onto a qualifying road cannot be rebuilt. The listing may say 再建築不可, or may not mention it at all.

Whether the boundaries are confirmed. Many older properties have never been surveyed against neighbouring plots. This is resolvable and it is expensive.

Whether there is a private road burden. Part of what you are buying may be road.

What the ground is like. Landslide caution zones, flood depth, liquefaction risk. Published by every municipality, mentioned on almost no listing.

Whether it meets current seismic standards. Japan's standard changed in 1981 and again in 2000. A house built in 1978 is legal, insurable and sellable, and it will behave differently in an earthquake than one built in 2005.

The real condition. Photographs are chosen. Some listings have twenty; some have three exteriors and a floor plan, which usually tells you something.

Chapter 12 covers these in detail. For now, the point is that the portals are excellent for finding candidates and useless for evaluating them.

When you have found it on social media

This comes up constantly, so it is worth its own section.

You see a beautiful machiya on Instagram, or in a curated newsletter, or on one of the sites that collect photogenic Japanese houses for an English-speaking audience. You want to know where it is and what it costs. The account will not tell you, or wants you to enquire through them.

You usually do not need them.

Save the photograph and run it through Google image search. Property photographs on those accounts are almost always lifted from a portal listing, and reverse image search will find the original. Once you have it, you have the price, the land area, the year built, the zoning, and the name of the agent handling it.

The address will probably still be hidden. Japanese listings routinely withhold the exact address, usually giving the neighbourhood and the nearest station instead. This is a security convention, not evasion. If you need the precise location — and before you offer, you do — an agent can retrieve it from REINS.

This is worth knowing because the curated accounts are often several steps removed from the property. By the time a house has been photographed, written up and posted, it may have been on the market for weeks, and the enquiry you send through the account has to travel back through the same chain.

Then what happens

You will find properties. You will send enquiries.

Most of them will not be answered.

That is not a failure of your search, and it is not personal. It is the subject of the next chapter.

Next: Chapter 5 — Why nobody replies, and what a buyer's agent changes.