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Comment by antcas | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I hear about the used housing market (or lack thereof) in Japan I wonder if there's an opportunity to find some amazing deals. Properties that could be purchased way under value and re-purposed. Either on a personal level (foreigner wants to buy a house) or as a cheap way of setting up a hotel or AirBnB kind of business.

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Hotels are already cheap in Japan ($60 a night will get you quite a nice business hotel with hot spring in most places I've been) and Airbnb is subject to local restrictions (federal law passed recently allows local governments to place restrictions on Airbnb - you have to get a permission letter from your city Hall to be allowed to list on airbnb - and they can deny you for any reason eg neighbour complaints). Personal use would be a possibility for sure.

$60 a night is not cheap. I traveled (cycling) for 3 months in South East Asia and my average hotel bill was $8, some of them brand new hotels.

You can’t possibly expect a highly developed nation to have comparable prices against south east Asia.

My point is that there are many young Vietnamese hoteliers who would love to move to Japan and operate some of these abandoned houses as hotels. They will have to do all the renovations, cleaning etc. themselves, but they will earn much more money.

The largest obstacle will be Japanese regulation.

SE Asia is a completely different economy though. Japan is a first world country, and the third largest economy in the world. Its not going to cost the same as someplace in SEA.

In addition to what everyone else said about it not being a useful comparison to look at SE Asia, I also wasn't looking at the cheapest options. Capsule hotels would generally be available for half that ($30) and sleeping in a manga cafe would be $10-$20 depending

My wife is in this business although she buys quite expensive old homes and buildings in cities. You will probably have trouble with sellers (and certainly with banks) if you’re a foreigner. Also, the short term rental legalities are a liability in most places unless you can get registered as a proper hotel. Some communities will outright ban short term rentals because they don’t like the turnover of visitors. It can be done though.

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