I'm wondering about how much I could buy some rural property in japan. I read an article that said the Hokkaido prefecture was giving land to anyone who would build on it but I'm not sure if they are still doing this. Any information on how to locate preferably cheap property is what I'm looking for.
Japan - 3 Answers
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1 :
http://www.fudosan-k.com/ This site has some extremely cheap land in Hokkaido. I saw 30 tsubo (about 1,000 square feet) of agricultural use land in Ebetsu (outside Sapporo) for about $5,000, as I recall. I'm not 100% sure, but I think people buy very small plots like this for "weekend farm" so they can take their kids out there and garden on the weekends. The land may be cheap, but the visa will be your main issue. Foreigners can buy land in Japan (that's legal), but to live there, you'll need a residence visa to stay for more than three months. For that, you'll probably either need a job (it's apparently extremely hard to even find a job teaching English these days), a Japanese spouse, or a university that you're attending. Without one of these things, you probably won't be able to get a residence visa and actually LIVE on your land. And since a job or a university is likely to be located in the city, it'd be one heck of a commute. You might spend so much money on transportation, it would completely offset the advantage of owning your own land, but I will leave that up to you to decide. Of course, if you were to marry a Japanese person, or live in Japan enough years to be granted eijuuken (that's A LOT of years), I'd imagine owning rural Hokkaido land would allow you to economize to the extreme and would be great if you were self-employed and didn't need to commute anywhere. And as for free land, first of all, that's probably only for Japanese or permanent residents of Japan, and that probably has some kind of stipulation like "you must build a house on it within two years." And even if foreigners are eligible, it's better to pay for land in a not-so-bad location than to get free land right next to Sakhalin where temperatures go down to -39 degrees and where there is no civilization (or jobs) in sight!
2 :
>I'm wondering about how much I could buy some rural property in japan. If you want to buy a house or something cheaply in Japan, you need to find it in rural area. But those areas do not have much population. It means there are not many jobs. And salary is low. So it's difficult to keep living there. Anyway, you may find a $200,000 house in rural Japan. >Hokkaido prefecture was giving land to anyone who would build on it but I'm not sure if they are still doing this. At least, there is nothing like that now. >How much does it cost to live in Japan? If you are alone, you can live with $30,000 per year. But cost to raise kids is very high. You need $60,000 or so (as combined income of couple) to raise kids. BTW, you can't live in Japan even if you bought a house. You need working visa or some other visa.
3 :
You need to have a valid official visa to stay in Japan no matter if you need to work or not. Some extremely inexpensive rural real estate in Hokkaido are all located ultimately inconvenient. Winter is long and hard but Summer is short but still cold and you'll see some Japanese brown bears as uninvited guest too. It might be no community. Neither school nor convenience store within one hour drive. There is very poor common lifeline such as public utilities like electoricity, propane, water system, drainage, collecting garvage and/or even public passage service etc. You need to do away with everything by yourself. Property tax will be charged annually though. We know the reason why it is so cheap is because nobody has paying interest on those barren estate. If you don't have any visa status problem, no need any job there nor to care of the basic public lifeline to survive in, The property starting cost total less than US$50,000 subject to some reason is not too difficult to find out there. But again, if you even get some cheap property, your running cost to live in there would not be so cheap anyway.
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