Already Own in Japan? You Need Someone on the Ground.

Plenty of people buy a house in Japan through an agent, a friend, an auction or a portal, and then discover that the agent's interest ended at settlement. The tax bills arrive in Japanese at an empty house. The neighbour has a complaint nobody's heard. The hot water system dies in January and the only quote comes from a contractor the previous manager chose, addressed to the previous manager, at a price nobody questioned.

You don't need to have bought through us to be looked after by us. This page is for owners who already hold property in Japan and need someone here who will actually do the job.

What "on the ground" means with us

It means a person, not a call centre. We're based in Tomisato in Chiba, near Narita, and we drive to the property. We photograph it ourselves rather than trusting the last photographs anyone took. We deal with the town office, the neighbour, the electrician and the roofer in person and in Japanese, and we report back to you in plain English with the numbers attached.

It also means the compliance side is handled properly. A non-resident owner needs a tax representative appointed three times over, with the municipality for the annual property tax, with the prefecture for the one-off acquisition tax, and with the national tax office if there's rental income, plus a domestic contact recorded on the title. Most owners who bought elsewhere have one of the four in place, usually the first. We put all of them in place, receive every bill, pay it, and send you a statement showing what was paid and when.

What the average manager does with a repair

This is the part worth reading closely, because it's where the money goes.

The standard practice in Japanese property management is to arrange repairs through the manager's own designated contractor and add a handling fee of 10 to 20 percent of the works on top. The industry's own worked example is a ¥500,000 repair carrying ¥50,000 to ¥100,000 in fees. What that fee buys is arrangement. It does not buy competitive quotes, and it does not buy negotiation, because the manager's contractor is already chosen. For a Japanese owner that's a convenience they can opt out of by finding their own tradesman. For an owner in Sydney or Seattle who can't read the quote, there's no opting out. You pay what the sheet says.

Our coordination fee sits at the same kind of percentage. What it buys is the opposite: several quotes, read in Japanese, argued over, and a job scoped to what you actually need rather than what the contractor would like to sell.

A real example: the hot water system

A client with an apartment in a Niigata ski town came to us from another manager. The hot water system had failed. The quote she'd inherited, from the previous manager's contractor, was for a 370-litre replacement unit at ¥550,000 including tax. It was addressed to the manager, not to her. Buried in it was a discount line of ¥33,033, applied purely to land the total on a round ¥500,000 before tax, which tells you the price was set by what the client would bear rather than built up from cost.

To keep the bill down, she was preparing to accept a 200-litre unit instead, a downgrade the contractor's own quote noted was adequate for two people showering.

We sourced the same 370-litre unit, installed, for ¥302,500 including tax. Our entire installed job came in below the other quote's price for the appliance alone. The saving on the identical specification was ¥247,500, or 45 percent. The smaller unit she was about to settle for would still have cost her roughly ¥180,000 more than the larger one she actually got. It was installed in April after we negotiated access, notice and working hours with a building manager who would rather it hadn't happened at all.

Our charges for that whole year, a first-year retainer of ¥70,000 and a coordination fee of ¥45,375 on the works, came to ¥115,375. The saving was more than twice everything we billed her. That's the standard we hold ourselves to: over time, we aim to save you more than we cost you, and we keep the receipts to prove it.

What's included and what it costs

No consumption tax is charged on any of it.

Service	Fee	What you get
Annual representation	¥70,000 first year for owners who didn't buy through us, then ¥60,000 a year. Covers up to three properties; ¥10,000 a year for each beyond three	Tax representative appointments with the municipality, the prefecture and the national tax office; domestic contact on the title; a Japanese mailing address for every official letter; utility set-up and bill payment; the administrative side of your annual tax return
Direct management	5 percent of gross rent	We run the tenancy: rent collection, tenant contact, inspections, repairs
Oversight	2 percent of gross rent	You have a tenant or an operator already; we keep an eye on the property and the money and step in when needed
Self-use or holding	No monthly fee	For a holiday house or a property you're holding empty: pay only for what we do, at the hourly rate
Repair and renovation coordination	15 percent of the first ¥1 million of works, 10 percent to ¥10 million, 5 percent above; ¥6,000 minimum	Quotes sourced and compared, scope negotiated, progress checked, defects listed, invoices paid. Repairs up to ¥50,000 pre-authorised
Anything else	¥6,000 an hour, one hour minimum then half-hour increments, travel at cost	Site visits, meetings with contractors or officials, insurance claims, the unexpected

If the house sits idle for part of the year, it can earn something without the minpaku hassle. Kichi, our sister platform, lets furnished houses on 30-day leases and markets them on the owner's behalf for a share of the rent, with no notification, no registered manager and no callout duty, because a 30-day tenancy sits outside the accommodation laws altogether. The management plan above runs alongside it.

The obvious objection is that our percentage sits on top of the contractor's own overhead. It does, and every mature market separates the two, because a contractor's overhead pays for managing their own crew and their own risk, and it's paid to the party being supervised. Without someone on your side of the table, you're relying on the firm you're paying to supervise itself, in a language you can't read, from the other side of the world. On a talkative job we'll offer you the hourly rate instead and let you work out which is cheaper. Usually the percentage is.

Track record

We've handled 29 purchases since our first client in June 2025, and every client who bought through us has kept the property under our management. Experienced investors who bought elsewhere have switched to us, which is a better reference than anything we could write about ourselves. Our managed portfolio runs from Kyushu to Hokkaido. Nothing in Okinawa yet, so if you'd like to be the first, we're listening.

The person doing the work is Glen, a permanent resident who has lived in Japan for 15 of the last 29 years, speaks the language at native level, and runs the business himself. When you write, he answers. More about him here.

Switching to us

Tell us what you own and what's in place. We'll read your existing management contract for its notice period and any traps, take over the tax representative appointments and the domestic contact, move the utilities and the post, arrange the handover of keys and documents, and make a first visit with a written condition report and our own photographs, so you know what you actually have. From then on you get a statement of everything paid, and a straight answer to every question.

Get in touch with the address and a sentence about the situation. We'll come back to you with something concrete.