Demolition Time

The sale of our land went through a few weeks after the acceptance of the offer. There were, however, quite a few hurdles to get over before we were to become the owners. I’ll cover the important elements briefly below.

After paying the deposit (in actual cash, because...Japan) we had a meeting onsite to discuss the knocking down of the buildings and the preparations for building. In those few weeks, there had been a lot of rain and the land resembled an Amazonian jungle. Yuko’s father clearly thought we were crazy on seeing it for the first time in this state. I don’t know if he shared our vision at that point but I think he was excited by the project all the same.

At the meeting, there were a large number of people assembled from both sides along with the various intermediaries. Since we’d bought the land for a good price, the seller wanted to avoid anything too labor intensive in taking down the existing buildings. We pushed back via the agent on a couple of issues and there were a number of uncomfortable silences in the negotiation, which are part and parcel of life in Japan. Fortunately, the seller blinked first on the important stuff and we made a few concessions for things that we didn’t care much about or wanted anyway (keeping the concrete flowerbeds, for instance). We agreed on a time to start the demolition, scheduled a follow-up appointment, exchanged a few hundred bows and that was it.

Fast forward a few weeks and demolition started in earnest. Unfortunately, I was away on a work trip in the UK so wasn’t able to head to the land to watch some of this process although our estate agent, who also lives in the area, kindly agreed to take some photos for us every few days. Rather than try and explain, I’ll just let the pictures do the talking.

The front of the old house with"The Sh**er"

The old front door to the East side of the plot

The West side of the old house and the western boundary of the plot

A concrete flower bed. There was a long silence over whether or not the previous owner would remove it.
Eventually he agreed to do it.

The parking area covered by the hideous red structure. It's still a tight parking space now, even without the metal railings.

The side gate on the south side of the property. The rusty nails were probably the biggest deterrent to intruders.

The beautiful but rather impractical stone staircase up to the house.

A small garden area to the south side of the plot.

Demolition begins!

The Sh**er is no more!

Some pretty serious equipment was brought in. The whole process took less than 2 weeks.

The stone retaining wall, now clear of trees and detritus.

View to the North West down the road over the large stone retaining wall.

The concrete flower beds that we agreed to keep. Should be useful for growing vegetables and herbs.

Our flat, clean plot. Ready(ish) for building.

Facing south. You can see the large wall with house being renovated. The house to the East (LHS) is brand new.

A profile of our tricky but beautiful land!

And just like that, the land was clear! In fact, the seller went above and beyond what was agreed in clearing the house and left things in a very presentable condition indeed. We expected to have an awful lot still to do to get things ready before building, but his team evidently couldn’t stop once they got started. Once again, we managed to achieve our best-case scenario. We secretly wondered how long this good fortune would last.

After the land preparation was completed, we had a final meeting in which several reams of paperwork and documents needed to be stamped. When I say “stamped”, I mean it in the literal sense. Official documents are not often signed in Japan. Instead, a rather archaic system is used in which each person stamps documents with their own personal wooden seal (called an inkan or hanko) in red ink. It’s rather impractical (you often have to carry this seal with you) and sometimes the seal itself is not enough. You also need a certificate to confirm that it is in fact your seal and not someone else’s. Since neither I, Yuko nor the sellers were judged to be proficient enough at stamping ourselves, our representatives took over whilst we watched... for almost an hour.

With the paperwork completed, in August 2017 we were officially owners of a slightly eccentric but equally charming plot of land on a mountain in Osaka and ready to embark on our journey to build a house. There was, however, one small snag. Our wedding was to be in November and wedding preparations and house preparations do not make for wonderful bedfellows. As such, Yuko imposed an absolute ban on any kind of house discussion whatsoever until after the wedding. I mostly respected her wishes and was quickly rebuked at any attempt to bring up the subject.

November was wonderful (of course!) and quickly became December and then honeymoon in January and before we knew it, it was March 2018. With our land having sat there all lonely and vacant for 7 months, it was finally time to start talking about the next stage, and that is where we will leave this blog entry for now. Until next time!

Land Ahoy!

First of all, an apology. It has been an embarrassingly long time since we last posted on this blog. I’m ashamed to see that over a year has passed. The main reason for this is simply that life just has a habit of getting in the way. I will endeavor to do better in future!

In our last post, I mentioned that we had put an offer in on a piece of land. More on the specifics of that later but first, a few words about the area of East Osaka in which we were looking. The area is suburban with good schools and good rail and road transport links into the center of Osaka. In the town/village itself, there are very few shops, almost no restaurants and no decent supermarkets either but these are all easily accessible by car or train. What it does have is greenery, incredible views and a real proper Japan countryside feel (and a great convenience store!). It’s a place where we know we would be happy to raise a family and to live in for the foreseeable future.

One challenge in finding land there was simply the absence of land plots available in the area, which has become increasingly popular with young families and also with grown up children returning to their family home after their parents have passed on (a common source of available land parcels) and deciding not to sell up but rather to stay themselves.

Another issue was that the area we were interested in is on the side of a small mountain (hill?) which offers some unique challenges for housebuilding in general. Since the mountain is small and reasonably densely populated, the roads that do exist are often quite steep and/or narrow.

We thought very carefully about the practicalities of living up or down a very steep slope from the station and basically came up with a notional cut-off point, “the line past which we would not cross”. Any plots past this line on the map were nixed on the basis that we didn’t want to walk too far uphill to get to the station. Luckily, the mountain features a kind of n-shaped spur jutting out which provides two elevated areas with a relatively flat walk to the station. We concentrated our search on these two areas.

Several months of searching produced precious little. We visited a few plots of land which were well located but all had some major issue. We came up against steep hills, plots that were too small or oddly shaped, expensive demolition projects, a lack of parking etc. etc. I wouldn’t say that we were close to giving up but our searches were becoming more wild and unwieldy and the catchment area in which were searching became unmanageably large.

There was one plot of land however with an old house and a hideous looking rusty red elevated shed on it that we had nicknamed “The Shitter” in our web-browsing. We passed it over time and time again until one day, for some unknown reason, we decided to go and look at it. I think it was probably the frustration at finding nothing new and wanting to feel like we were at least doing something.

I (Tom) went with the agent to see this large (by Japanese standards) 275sqm plot of land, which was situated about 7 minutes’ walk from the train station on one of the spurs, about 50 meters from a plot I had visited months ago (expensive concrete demolition required). True to the pictures, the shed was hideous and I concluded within about 10 seconds that the house next to it would have to also be torn down as there was no scope for remodeling, which was an option we were still considering at the time. Still, the views were nice and the place had a lot of character.

As we walked around, it was evident that this land would be difficult to deal with. Far from being a pretty, flat (expensive) parcel that most Japanese buyers favor, this plot was raised 3 meters above the road with a stepped stone retaining wall and old stone staircase leading up to a relatively flat plot at the top. By my calculations, only the flat plot would be buildable on so we would be instantly losing 30-40sqm of building area. The parking area was less than ideal too.

However, from the top it was clear that it would at least have rather nice west-facing views of the Osaka cityscape over the house in front (whose foundations are 3-4 meters lower) and an unrestricted view of the mountains in the distance to the North West. I was intrigued but far from sold on the idea. I started making calculations in my head about demolition costs (extortionate in Japan), land preparation costs, groundwork, utilities and so on. Things weren’t looking great.

The agents spoke to each other and mine came back to me with some rather surprising news. Although it hadn’t been well stated on the listing, the seller’s agent informed us that, since the seller ran a construction company, they would be willing to sell the land 更地 or “sarachi”. In other words, he would knock the old buildings down for us and prepare the land a bit as part of the deal.

To say this changed things is an understatement. This turned the land from an overlooked non-starter into a potential bargain. Suddenly, the land was worth considering seriously. Nevertheless, there were still a number of unanswered questions about things like sewerage, building regulations, utilities etc.

I won’t go into too much detail about that here as a lot of these things were somewhat unique to this particular plot but will summarize by saying that, each time we made inquiries about these issues, we created a notional best-case and worst-case scenario for how much it would cost. Almost without fail, every quote we got was at the right end of that scale. The positives were really stacking up.

A few weeks after first going to see the land and going back a few more times and making more inquiries, we felt that there were enough positives and there was enough potential to push ahead with an offer. The question was how much to offer! The land had been on the market for a long time and, in that time, the price had fallen by 40%. This didn’t perturb us too much as we figured that many Japanese buyers would be put off by the existing house or the perceived difficulty in construction. We’d made contingencies for any such issues and, although we were certain we didn’t have all the facts, we felt confident enough to make an offer.

After a lot of discussion and consultation with friends and family, we came up with a number and put our offer to the sellers. In truth, we did not expect this offer to be accepted as it was a full 20% below the already heavily reduced asking price. We expected this to be the start of a long and tedious negotiation. However, on a Monday afternoon in June 2017, we got a somewhat shocked and excited call from our agent telling us that the offer had actually been accepted. It was the last thing we expected and completely threw us.

A lowball or “dirty” offer is an interesting conundrum. Because it’s unlikely that it will be accepted, it’s an offer you can make a little more freely with perhaps a little less commitment. As we discovered, when it’s accepted, the first thing you do is panic and question just how serious you really are. Honestly, it didn’t really feel real at all. It took a few weeks for us to start to appreciate that this was going to happen!

This blog post is already far too long and it takes us rather nicely up to the point of the acceptance of our offer, which seems a good place to leave things for now. There have been a number of developments since then so I’ll be covering these in some catch-up posts over the next few weeks. For now, it’s good to be back and we hope you’ve enjoyed reading!