Photo: @antoninjapan on TikTok.
Screengrabs from a viral TikTok video posted by Anton Wormann (pictured right), who bought an abandoned farm in Japan for $15,000.
Here’s a young man with a novel approach to making his fortune. It involves abandoned houses, or akiya, in Japan.
In October, Soo Kim wrote at Newsweek, “Anton Wormann, 31, who is originally from Sweden, relocated to Japan in 2018 after living in New York. He recently purchased an abandoned farm for $15,000 ‘right by the beach’ in Kujukuri, a town in the Chiba prefecture of Honshu, the largest and most populous island of Japan.
“Wormann shared a tour of the abandoned property, where ‘everything was left as is,’ in a video posted on his TikTok account Anton in Japan (@antoninjapan). …
“The farm comes with 11 rooms in a 250-square-meter house (about 2,690 square feet) and 0.62-acre garden ‘where you can hear the waves,’ he said in the clip.
“Located about 150 meters (0.09 mile) from the beach in Kujukuri, the farmhouse has six bedrooms and five living rooms as well as a kitchen, a toilet, a big garage and two other smaller structures on the compound.
” ‘I bought this farm about two months ago but only recently found the time to begin renovations,’ Wormann told Newsweek. ‘The land is … located about an hour away from central Tokyo by car. The previous owners were a family with grown-up children who no longer wanted to maintain the property after it had been vacant for so long. …
“Wormann, who has a background in fashion modeling and media, now focuses on real estate projects, particularly DIY renovations of abandoned homes.
“He’s been buying and renovating vacant homes in Tokyo for the past five years and ‘wanted to take on a project in the Japanese countryside to try something new,’ he told Newsweek. Wormann is also the author of the book Free Houses in Japan, released in 2023, which explains how he earns money through renovation projects like this in Japan.
” ‘There are tons of cheap abandoned homes in Japan, but this one is the cheapest one I’ve come across in the vicinity of Tokyo that still had a great location, a big piece of land and the potential of turning gorgeous again,’ he said.
“The renovation of the abandoned farm is in its early stages, ‘but there’s a lot of work ahead,’ Wormann noted, adding that ‘my vision is to transform the farmhouse into a mix of traditional Japanese and Scandinavian design, maintaining the rustic charm while modernizing it.’
“The footage in the viral video shows a building surrounded by greenery, including a large tree near a doorway in the garden space.
“The camera later enters the home, which is cluttered with various items, from cleaning products, shoes and umbrellas to toys, random memorabilia and several boxes.
” ‘The potential of this place is phenomenal,’ he says in the clip. ‘Now the crazy part is everything is left as is by the previous owners. When I say everything, I mean everything,’ he notes, as the footage shows various items such as a bottle of ‘very old rare’ Suntory whiskey, around 20 stuffed animals, about 500 kimonos (a traditional Japanese garment), ‘loads and loads’ of games, Pokemon cards and ‘anime-related stuff,’ as well as an unopened safe.
“Holding his shirt up toward his face, he says in the video: ‘This is what nine years abandoned plus a minor water leak in the kitchen smells like.’ The footage shows a kitchen setting with several plastic buckets filled with murky water.
“He continues: ‘The worst part is we can’t start the renovation and actually see what we bought until we’ve cleaned out all these treasures. …
” ‘Some of these things are probably worth a lot but I don’t know where to start,’ he says as the video concludes.
“Wormann’s been buying and renovating abandoned homes before turning them into short-term rentals at a rate of about one house a year since moving to Japan. He finds the homes by looking through Japanese websites and has a network of brokers around him who also help find the houses.
” ‘There are many reasons why there are so many abandoned homes in Japan,’ he noted, from a declining population and a preference for newer residences to ‘a high stock of apartment and houses.’
” ‘Japanese houses and real estate also depreciates over the years, making older houses over 20 to 30 years more or less worthless, and you basically only pay for the land if you buy older houses,’ he said.”
More at Newsweek, here. I first learned about the issue of abandoned houses in Japan at the radio show The World, here. See more pictures at Koryoya.
Now watch this video from an American couple who also have made a business doing this. Very cool.
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