Buying Real Estate in Japan: What Locals Actually Say

The relocation guides sell Japan on abandoned $500 countryside houses. Japanese-language real-estate data is describing a very different market: the one in the cities people actually move to.

July 2026 · Researched via local Japanese and Korean internet sources using LikeLoc · 26 Japanese sources · 20 Korean sources

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Every "moving to Japan" guide eventually mentions akiya — the country's millions of vacant houses, some listed for a few hundred dollars, framed as a foreigner's backdoor into homeownership in a famously hard-to-crack market. It's a real phenomenon, and it's not wrong. It's also almost never where the relocators reading those guides actually want to live.

I searched "buying property and the real estate market" in 日本語 through local Japanese sources — and the conversation happening there isn't about bargain houses at all.

New condo prices in Tokyo's 23 wards rose 18.4% in a year. Used condos in the same wards rose 27.9%. Nobody in that data is talking about $500 houses.

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Japan

The akiya story is true. It's also not the market most movers will meet.

Japanese-language real-estate sources searched here aren't discussing the rural vacant-house glut the English-language guides lead with — they're discussing Tokyo and Osaka, because that's where housing demand, and the accompanying stress, actually concentrates. According to Tokyo Kantei data cited in local coverage, new condominium prices across Tokyo's 23 central wards rose 18.4% year-on-year, with Saitama prefecture up 12.5%; resale condos in Tokyo climbed even further, up 27.9% in the same period, even as the number of resale listings fell for a second straight year. New-build supply across the greater Tokyo region dropped 10.3% to its fourth consecutive annual decline — developers, local analysts note, are increasingly pricing toward wealthier buyers rather than expanding supply for the middle of the market.

Underneath the price data sits a rate story English guides rarely mention: after the Bank of Japan's 2024 policy shift ended over a decade of near-zero rates, both fixed and variable mortgage rates have been climbing, and local financial advisers now describe a 0.5-point rate move as adding millions of yen to a 35-year loan's total cost — a live, first-order risk for anyone financing a purchase rather than paying cash. One consequence local sources describe explicitly: ordinary Tokyo families are being priced out of the 23 wards into surrounding areas, or into properties 30–40 years old, because that's what a middle income can still reach. Yen weakness cuts the other way for a certain kind of buyer — it's made Japanese property look cheap to foreign and institutional capital, which local market outlooks describe as a demand floor propping prices up even as ordinary households get squeezed out from underneath.

None of this erases the akiya opportunity — it is genuinely one of the few large, developed-country markets where a very cheap house is a real, buyable thing. It does mean that opportunity sits almost entirely outside the cities most relocators actually search for, and that the Japanese-language conversation about "buying property in Japan" right now is a story about rates and squeeze, not bargains. For the fuller local picture, what locals in Japan say about buying property goes deeper than the akiya headlines, and pairs well with the real cost of living in Japan and how safe daily life feels for Japanese residents before treating any single viral house-listing as representative.

→ Explore the live Japan search on LikeLoc

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South Korea's version of the same squeeze

Korean-language sources describe a market with a sharper political edge than Japan's. Local policy coverage puts a mid-size Gangnam apartment (roughly 115 square metres) trading between 3 and 5 billion won, against nearly 1 million homeless, unmarried households in their 20s and 30s living in Seoul — a gap local commentators describe not as a housing shortage but as a distribution problem, with government researchers openly debating whether real estate should be treated as a place to live or a wealth-accumulation vehicle. Interest-rate policy adds its own local twist: falling mortgage rates are expected to revive buying demand and expectations of further price rises through 2026, the opposite direction of Japan's rate story, but research institutes still flag persistent supply shortfalls and policy inconsistency as the market's core, unresolved problem.

→ Explore the live South Korea search on LikeLoc

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The relocation takeaway

Both countries have a real, well-documented "cheap housing" story an English guide can point to — Japan's rural akiya, Korea's expectation of policy-driven relief. Neither story is the one dominating the local-language conversation about buying property today: in Japan it's a rate-and-squeeze story hitting the capital region specifically; in Korea it's a supply-and-fairness fight over who gets priced out of Seoul. Anyone relocating on the strength of a viral $500-house headline is reading about a market that exists — just not the one they'll be shopping in once they've picked a city to actually live in.

Selected sources

• 2026年の不動産価格はどうなる？過去の推移や今後の見通しを解説 — "What will happen to real estate prices in 2026? Past trends and future outlook" (Homes.co.jp, on resale price gains, inventory levels and rate risk)
• 【2026年最新版】住宅購入のタイミングは？金利上昇と価格多極化を乗り切る不動産・ローン戦略 — "2026 edition: when to buy a home? Navigating rate rises and price polarization" (Otemachi Financial, on the end of Japan's ultra-low-rate era)
• 不動産市場の動向：マンション市場の供給・価格動向と2026年の見通し — "Real estate market trends: condo supply, prices and the 2026 outlook" (Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Realty, citing Tokyo Kantei data on ward-level price and supply figures)
• 世界主要都市の不動産市場動向から見る日本不動産市場の現在地と今後の展望 — "Japan's real estate market today, seen through global city trends" (LinkRealty, on foreign capital and yen weakness supporting demand)
• "부동산 시장 정상화, 지금 아니면 안 돼…실소유자 중심 재편 필요" — "'Real estate market normalization — now or never; must shift to a real-occupant-first system'" (Korea Policy Briefing, an official government-policy interview citing the Gangnam price gap)
• 신속한 공급 확대로 부동산 시장 균형 달성이 필요! — "Rapid supply expansion is needed to achieve real-estate market balance" (Korea Development Institute, on rate expectations and housing-demand forecasts)