English-language discussion of Japanese vacant houses tends to divide into enthusiasm and warnings about scams. In our experience neither is the useful frame. We have not met a fraudulent akiya listing. We have met a great many listings where something expensive was true and nobody had looked.
What follows is the list of failures we actually encounter, with our own data where we have it. The last one is ours.
1. The site cannot legally be rebuilt on
This is the most expensive thing to discover late, because it is not a repair — it is a permanent change to what the land is.
Under Article 43 of the Building Standards Act (建築基準法), a building site within a city planning area must abut a legally recognised road of at least 4 metres in width — 6 metres in some designated areas — along at least 2 metres of its boundary. A site that fails this test is 再建築不可: once the existing building is gone, you may not put another one up.
The consequences compound. You cannot rebuild, which caps what you can ever do with the land. Major reconstruction may be restricted. The property is poor security for any lender. And resale is to a much smaller pool of buyers, who all know the same thing you now know.
In our own set, 3 of the 90 houses where we recorded road access abut only a private road. A private road is not automatically disqualifying — it may still be a recognised road, or a carve-out may apply — but it is the signal to go and check rather than assume.
The road’s legal status is a matter of public record at the municipality. It is also one of the items a licensed agent must set out in the statement of important matters. Which is the practical argument for having an agent in the chain: see what an akiya bank is and is not.
2. The land is registered as farmland
A plot that reads as a generous garden can be registered agricultural land, governed by the Agricultural Land Act (農地法), which restricts who may acquire it and what it may be used for.
This catches Japanese buyers too — it is not a foreigner-specific rule — and it is a hard stop rather than a cost. No amount of willingness to pay converts farmland into a building plot on your timetable. Forest land carries its own notification and management obligations, and rural plots quite often include some.
The test is the registered classification of the land, not what it looks like.
3. Nobody priced the drainage
73 of the 90 houses where we recorded it drain to a septic tank (浄化槽), not a municipal sewer.
This is normal in rural Japan and entirely workable. What goes wrong is treating it as a connection rather than as an appliance you have just bought. A septic tank has statutory inspection obligations, needs periodic emptying, and has a service life. On a house that has stood empty for years, the unit may be at or past the end of it, and replacement includes the groundwork to reach it.
The same applies upstream: 28 of 90 of our houses are not on public water, with 23 on a private association supply and 5 on a private source such as a well. Association membership means fees and shared governance. A private source means pumps, tanks and water quality testing. On a long-empty house, pipework may not hold pressure until it is replaced.
None of these are reasons not to buy. They are reasons the budget in your head is too low. We set out the cost structure in what renovation actually costs and what it costs to keep a house you are not living in.
4. The short-term-rental plan was never checked
If your model depends on letting the house to travellers, this is the assumption most likely to be wrong, and we can put a number on how often it is simply unverified.
Of our 94 surveyed houses, the short-term-rental position of 86 was recorded as requiring verification before purchase. Exactly 2 were recorded as confirmed permitted.
That is not us being lazy. It is an accurate description of the state of the information in this market. Whether you may operate depends on several independent things at once: the zoning of the site, the municipality’s own ordinance, any estate or homeowners’ association rules, and which licensing route you intend to use. Resort municipalities in particular restrict vacation-rental operation in designated areas and seasons.
Two specifics from our own notes, as examples of how local this gets. For one Hakone property we recorded that Kanagawa Prefecture restricts vacation rental operation in certain designated resort areas during peak months, and that operating as a simple lodging under the Hotel Business Act (旅館業法 簡易宿所) is exempt from that restriction — so the answer turns on which zone the site is in and which route you take. For a Karuizawa property we recorded that the town requires notification and environmental compliance, and that the villa estate’s own association rules on short-term rental had to be verified separately.
The lesson generalises: the question is never “is this legal in Japan”, it is “is this permitted on this site, under this ordinance, under this estate’s rules, by this route.”
5. Nothing has been inspected
Across all 94 houses, we found no completed building inspection on file. Where the field was recorded at all, it recorded that no inspection had been done.
So every condition assessment in this market — ours included — is made from observation. Nobody has lifted a floor, opened a wall, or put a camera into the roof space. That is fine for deciding which houses to pursue. It is not fine as the basis for committing money, and since these purchases are almost always unfinanced there is no lender’s valuation standing between you and a surprise.
An inspection costs a small fraction of the variance it removes. Ordering one is the single highest-return decision available to a buyer at this end of the market.
6. Area labels are not locations — and this one is ours
In August 2026 we sent a buyer property information in which the stated location was wrong. The listing described the property as being at Lake Kawaguchi. It was not. It was in Doshi village, 22 to 25 kilometres from the lake.
The mechanism is worth understanding because it will affect listings you read elsewhere. Japanese property portals organise rural inventory by administrative groupings — a county, a district — and a single grouping can span several municipalities with completely different characters. The listing inherited an area label from the search category it sat in. The label was a category. We treated it as an address.
What makes this our failure rather than the portal’s is how we checked it. We confirmed that the price and the build year matched the source listing, and concluded the information was verified. But the price matched in a world where the location was also wrong. A check that passes whether or not the dangerous claim is true is not a check. We had verified the easy, pleasant facts and inferred the rest.
We corrected it to the buyer immediately, and we changed how we work:
- Location is now resolved from the source listing’s own address field, per property, never inherited from the category the listing sat in.
- Every property’s municipality is cross-checked against its coordinates mechanically. A mismatch stops the listing from being published.
- The same discipline now applies to our market statistics. In October 2026 we found that 18 of our own published property pages were quoting rental market figures belonging to a neighbouring municipality’s market, inherited the same way — in one case overstating annual market revenue by 71%. We re-sourced every figure from the market data provider’s own municipal tables and corrected them.
We are telling you this for two reasons. One, so you know the failure mode exists and will look for it in listings from anyone, us included: plot the actual address on a map before you believe the headline. Two, because any agent telling you they have never got anything wrong is telling you how much they check.
The verification list
Before you commit, have actual answers — from records, not from inference — on:
- Road frontage and the legal status of the road. This determines whether the site can ever be built on again.
- Land designation. Farmland, forest, and any area-specific regime.
- Zoning, and what it permits.
- Drainage and water supply, as systems with maintenance and replacement costs.
- Registered title, and whether inheritance registration has been completed. A seller who is not yet the registered owner cannot convey.
- Short-term-rental permission, if the plan depends on it — site, ordinance, estate rules and licensing route, all four.
- The actual address, plotted. Not the area name in the headline.
- A building inspection, opened up, by someone whose job is to find problems.
Items 1 to 6 are documentary and a licensed agent’s statement of important matters covers most of them — which is the strongest practical reason to have an agent in the chain even when buying from a municipal register.
Items 7 and 8 need someone physically at the house.
If you cannot be there
For a property you are considering — ours, another agent’s, or one from an akiya bank — we will go to it, make a Matterport 3D record of the building inside and out so you can walk it and measure it yourself, and write down what we could verify on site: road frontage, water and drainage, visible decay, signs of leaks, the immediate surroundings. We write only what we could see. Anything we could not check is recorded as not verified rather than guessed at — which, as the Doshi listing taught us, is the only honest way to write a record.
It is quoted per property on travel and floor area, billed under its own contract as a scanning and recording job. It is not a brokerage fee, and it does not oblige you to buy through us. Where we are the listing agent for a property, ordinary due-diligence costs are ours to carry, so this service is for properties we are not brokering.
Nothing here is legal, tax or investment advice. Municipal rules differ and change. Figures attributed to our own listings describe those properties as at 7 October 2026 and are not averages for Japan.