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Comment by tomohelix | Hacker News Reader

Buying one isn't hard. They are quite cheap. A completely broken house like the ones in the OP is probably begging to be sold. A 2k+ sqft livable house in the suburb of Tokyo is about $300k.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/17/realestate/japan-empty-ho... https://archive.is/BDCnm

But these are traditional Japanese houses so quite a lot of renovation is needed to bring it up to a Westerner's standards. Still, all in all, if you are fine with living in a backwater village with barely any modern conveniences then 200-300k for a big house is not too bad.

Assuming you can speak Japanese and don't mind the xenophobia...

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So a 2k sqft house here, in my European country, would be considered quite a large one, and my understanding is Japanese standards for housing sizes trend even smaller than here. I realise it's commonplace in parts of the USA, but you're likely paying a premium for getting a house that the market considers "oversized". Wikipedia seems to indicate that 1000 sqft is the average in Tokyo.

Tokyo is extremely dense and land is very expensive. The mountainous rural backblocks that contain these abandoned properties is not, and land is essentially worthless or negative value: it has no productive use, but you still need to pay taxes.

This is in fact a big reason why Japan has a big problem with abandoned rural property: there is no incentive for next of kin to sort out the inheritance paperwork, and then it's left in limbo.

Especially due to inheritance tax in Japan being very high. It can sometimes be cheaper to abandon inheritances, than actually claim them. Even if you do claim the inheritance, large expensive things like houses tend to be sold because the tax makes it unaffordable.

The amount one can inherit before having to even pay any tax is roughly 36m yen (pretend that it's USD360k equivalent). Considering that we're talking about properties in abandoned rural villages, there's nothing of value of inherit.

People are abandoning their inheritance not because they can't pay for it, but because the hassle of inheriting a worthless property only to have to spend your own money trying to sell it for less than 0 doesn't make economic sense. It gets worse when said property belongs to some grand aunt/uncle you've never heard of and thus doesn't even have any sentimental value worth forking over for.

Huh, I thought it was 10% at 1,0000,0000 yen. 15% at 3,0000,0000 and 20% at 5,0000,0000 (and so on.) That was what I was told previously at least.

But yea, the calculus is:

Total taxable amount of inheritance tax - Basic inheritance tax exemption (¥30 million + ¥6 million x number of legal heirs) = Total taxable amount of inheritance for inheritance tax purposes

FYI for those passing by, that New York Times article above is fantastic, I was about to post it as well.

It was discussed a couple months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35606413

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