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The story
A survey by Japan’s Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications puts the number of vacant homes nationwide at over 9 million, yet a 5ch thread turned to why so many of them go unrented even at prices below market rent. Posters pointed to the heavy burden of upkeep costs like property taxes and repairs, the risk of tenants who fall behind on rent or trash the property, and the way Japan’s Land and Building Lease Law makes it hard for landlords to terminate a lease, leaving owners at a disadvantage. The thread also touched on how difficult it can be for heirs to decide what to do with an inherited vacant home, and how elderly people living alone are often turned away over fears they’ll die unnoticed in the unit. Opinions flew over just why there’s such a gap between the housing supply and what actually gets rented out.
What people said
Why is this?
Throw in management fees, reserve funds for repairs, fire insurance, and everything else, and there's no profit to begin with.
And whatever you do manage to save up over a year just gets wiped out by renovation costs to make the place rentable again.
Property tax is just broken at this point, it's hopeless.
Property tax on a 3LDK (3 bedrooms plus living/dining/kitchen) shouldn't even hit 200,000 yen.
Property tax is cheap for residential land, though.
Anyone who wants to move into a vacant house is usually expecting cheap rent, right?
And that kind of tenant tends to be the troublesome type: they fall behind on payments, won't move out, and trash the place.
Is the Land and Building Lease Law the root cause?
That's part of it, but isn't this fundamentally a matter of basic decency?
Don't skip rent, keep what you're renting clean — that's just common sense.
If people who can't manage that would just quietly move out, the barrier to being a landlord would drop.
Isn't that exactly the point — the law lets them get away with not moving out quietly?
If it's a property you can only rent out cheap, there's not much you can do about it.
Plenty of owners also just haven't thought about how to get rid of it.
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Re: #22
No way, seriously? Mine works out to 43,500 yen a month.
And that's a conservative estimate.
It's usually a 20-year fixed-term lease, basically functioning like a fixed-term land lease.
If I'm covering the repair costs myself, how much am I even really paying?
I'm only willing to pay about as much as the property tax.
"Pay a few million yen in repairs to make it livable, and I'll cover your 100,000 yen a year in property tax instead!"
There's no upside for the landlord in that.
Well, this is really renovation for use as a minpaku (short-term vacation rental) or share house.
No idea what the total cost ends up being, but at minimum they'd redo the plumbing/kitchen/bath, plus wallpaper and flooring for a cosmetic touch-up — so I'd guess the tenant sinks in somewhere around 5-10 million yen.
The landlord probably just ends up paying the property tax.
Dead serious.
If you fall into that category, you genuinely end up stuck with either an actual prison or housing that's just as grim as one.
You can still rent, technically.
Just the kind of property normal people wouldn't want.
Yeah, that's true, it's all risk and no reward.
I'd consider it if they were willing to pay double market rent.
Having them handle the repairs themselves is way too much of an upside to pass up.
Ah, so the tenant pays the repair costs.
But there's still the downside that you can't sell the place if you want to, which is probably why nobody does this.
And if the landlord wants to end the lease for their own reasons, they'd end up covering the entire renovation cost plus paying the tenant to move out.
That's exactly why nobody rents vacant houses.
Because nobody's willing to fix them up.
That comes down to how the contract is structured. Just use a fixed-term lease — and even with a standard lease, the landlord can't terminate without "just cause."
You do need to spell out how ownership of the renovation work is categorized, though.
It ends up like what Re: #56 described, which is why nobody does it.
Legally speaking, tenants have a big advantage in Japan.
Also, unless the renovated section is clearly separable, you can't register it, so claiming ownership over it is difficult — though it's still safer to spell it out in the contract.
Suburban house rental: "Well, it's a whole house, so 80,000 yen."
It's strange that market forces don't naturally push prices to make more sense than that.
It's because that suburban house is falling apart.
Apartment: 50㎡, 60,000 yen
Detached house: 120㎡, 80,000 yen??
The math doesn't add up.
Where in Japan is an 80,000 yen house even a thing?
But there's the system for returning inherited land to the national treasury.
I'm planning to hand my useless inherited plot out in the countryside back to the government and say goodbye to it.
It's not like it's unconditional though.
Right, you can't use it if there's a vacant house still standing on the land.
Out in the countryside, some are already listed for as little as 500,000 yen.
And people still don't want them.
Fix up the plumbing and you're already into the millions of yen, and if there's anything else you don't like about it, you start thinking you'd be better off just buying a new house.
Probably cases where nobody can even get in touch with whoever holds the rights to them.
Those are usually unregistered properties with unknown owners, or ones that got inherited but would cost a fortune to demolish.
Whoa, really.
Guess a buyout is the only option for those, then.
Even with a buyout, the fundamental problem is that the heirs can't agree among themselves on what to do with the property.
Some object purely on sentimental grounds, like "it's ancestral land, I don't want to sell it,"
while others say prices will keep rising so now isn't the time.
On top of that, selling via a buyout is the biggest waste of money,
since the real estate company just pockets the resale profit.
Normally, even once the heirs agree to sell, they'd choose to go through a broker instead.
That might hold for a mansion, but for a house where you're not even sure it'll sell, wouldn't you want to just offload it to a buyer the moment one shows up?
That's exactly not what happens, which is why vacant houses exist in the first place…
Good properties get stuck in disputes over sale and management policy,
while bad properties can't sell even when the owner wants to, and even bad properties have their own disagreements over how to go about selling.
I guess amateurs just can't tell a good property from a bad one.
Background and Key Points
For context, a 2023 Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications survey found that vacant homes nationwide had topped 9 million, or 13.8% of all housing stock. The thread split over how heavy the property tax burden really is: against the claim that “half the rent disappears into taxes,” some pushed back that residential land qualifies for a special reduction in its taxable base, so the real burden shouldn’t be that severe. Another point of contention was the Land and Building Lease Law — the system that makes it hard for landlords to terminate a lease without “just cause” discourages the kind of renovation-premised or DIY-style rentals that might otherwise put more vacant homes to use. Something the thread didn’t touch on: the system letting heirs return inherited land to the national treasury excludes any lot with a building still standing on it, requiring the land be cleared first — which is itself one reason vacant houses tend to get left as they are.
※This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Nandemo Jikkyo G) thread “The Age of 9 Million Vacant Homes, Yet Apparently Nobody Will Rent Them Out Even Below Market Rate“.
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