Where to actually find akiya in 2026

Most "how to find an akiya" articles online are recycled. Same five sites in the same order, no opinion, no admission that half of them barely work outside Tokyo or for non-Japanese speakers. We've spent the last few weeks clicking through every credible source we could find. Here's what's actually worth your time, in the order we'd use them ourselves.

A quick note before the list. There is no single "Akiya Bank of Japan." When people use that phrase, they usually mean one of three things: a national aggregator portal, the directory site that links to all the local banks, or a specific municipality's own listing system. They behave very differently. Knowing which is which saves hours.

Tier 1 — Start here

These are the four we'd open first if we were starting from zero today.

LIFULL HOME'S Akiya Bank (homes.co.jp). The Ministry of Land (MLIT) picked LIFULL as one of two official national portals, so most participating municipalities feed listings here automatically. Japanese-only interface, but Google Translate handles the search filters fine. Prices are usually accurate, photos are usually current.

At Home Akiya Bank (athome.co.jp). The other MLIT-designated national portal. Some listings appear here that don't appear on LIFULL and vice versa, which is annoying — you have to check both. Same Japanese-only caveat.

akiyajapan.com (akiyajapan.com). Pulls from roughly 500 sources into a single English-language search. The aggregation is the strongest selling point — you don't have to learn 40 municipal interfaces. Listings are translated, prices shown in yen and USD, and they claim around a million properties indexed across all 47 prefectures. Worth opening even if you also use the official portals.

akiyabanks.com (akiyabanks.com). Not a listings site. It's a directory that links out to every municipal akiya bank in Japan, organized by prefecture and city. Use this when you've decided you want, say, Tottori, and you want to see what each town actually has on offer rather than what the aggregators chose to surface.

If you only check four sites, check these four.

Tier 2 — General real estate portals

The big Japanese portals carry akiya too, mixed in with normal listings. Inventory is bigger, akiya signal-to-noise is worse.

• SUUMO (suumo.jp) — the widest selection of any property site in Japan. Search by lowest price band and you'll find old houses for under ¥5M. Japanese only.
• At Home main site (athome.co.jp) — same company as the akiya bank above but the main portal includes everything.
• HOMES main site (homes.co.jp) — same logic.

Use these when the akiya-specific portals feel thin in the area you want. We default to SUUMO for ¥1M–¥10M rural pickups.

Tier 3 — Municipal akiya banks (cheapest, weirdest)

Roughly 1,000 Japanese municipalities run their own akiya bank. This is where you find the ¥0 and ¥500,000 listings, and where the real subsidy programs live. Akiya banks attached to depopulating towns frequently bundle properties with renovation grants, moving stipends, or property tax holidays for a few years.

The catch: every site is built differently, most are Japanese-only, some require you to mail in a paper application, and a few are still using HTML last touched in 2009.

The cheapest prefectures, consistently, are Akita, Tottori, Shimane, Kochi, and Tokushima. That's not a coincidence — they are also the prefectures losing population fastest, which is exactly why their akiya banks have the most inventory and the most generous incentives.

Find the bank for your target town through akiyabanks.com or by searching [city name] 空き家バンク on Google. Real Estate Japan keeps a prefecture-by-prefecture link list that we've used as a backup when akiyabanks.com was missing a small town.

Tier 4 — Specialty and English-friendly platforms

These sites are smaller but are run by people who actually care about the niche.

• AkiyaMart (akiya-mart.com) — clean English UI, hazard map overlays, Airbnb income estimates. Useful if you're thinking about a property as a rental.
• Old Houses Japan (oldhousesjapan.com) — leans toward kominka (traditional folk houses) and minka. Good if you want character; less useful if you want a 1990s suburban two-story.
• KORYOYA (koryoya.com) — kominka specialists. They restore some properties before listing, so prices are higher but the structures are vetted.
• Akiya & Inaka (akiyainaka.com) — countryside focus, helpful blog content alongside listings.
• All Akiyas (allakiyas.com) — another aggregator, decent overlap with akiyajapan.com but worth a parallel search.
• AkiyaHub (akiyahub.com) — concierge-style service rather than a pure listings site.

Tier 5 — Court auctions (kyoubai 競売)

Court auctions are how foreclosed properties get sold. The prices are sometimes spectacular, the risk is also spectacular: no inspections, no negotiation, occasional eviction obligations on the buyer, and a deposit you forfeit if you can't fund the win.

• 981.jp (981.jp) is an English-friendly information center for court auction properties.
• The official BIT system (運営: 不動産競売物件情報サイト) is searchable in Japanese and is the source of record.

We would not recommend kyoubai for a first purchase. We mention it because it exists and because the savings are real if you know what you're doing.

Tier 6 — Off-market

The cheapest akiya never make it onto any website. They sit empty for ten years because the heirs don't know what to do, can't agree, or live in another prefecture.

The way you find them is unglamorous:

1. Pick a town. Visit. Walk the streets and write down addresses of houses that look long-abandoned.
2. Stop in at the city hall (役場 / yakuba) and ask whether they keep a list of properties whose owners have indicated interest in selling.
3. Talk to the local fudosan (real estate office, the one with the handwritten signs in the window). Many have listings they've never digitized.
4. Drink with people in the local izakaya. We know how that sounds. It's also how a non-trivial number of foreign akiya buyers we've spoken with found their place.

This is high-effort, high-yield. It's also the only way to genuinely beat the aggregator market.

Reality check on prices

A few numbers so you have something concrete in your head.

• ¥0 to ¥500,000: rural, structurally questionable, often demolition-recommended. May come with the requirement that you live there for a few years.
• ¥500,000 to ¥3,000,000: typical rural akiya in good enough condition to renovate. The sweet spot for most of the buyers we've talked to.
• ¥3,000,000 to ¥10,000,000: better location, semi-rural, sometimes already renovated. Tokyo commute distance starts here in the upper half of this range.
• ¥10,000,000 and up: kominka in desirable tourist areas, restored properties, suburban Tokyo / Kansai outer fringe.

These are spring 2026 numbers based on what we're seeing across the platforms above. Yen prices haven't moved much in two years; the dollar prices look better than they did because of the exchange rate.

A note on the April 2026 reporting rule

Briefly, because every guide that touches buying needs to mention this. Since April 2026, foreign buyers must disclose citizenship at the time of property registration and file a residential use report within 20 days of purchase. This is a reporting requirement, not a buying restriction. Japan still has no law preventing foreign nationals from owning land or buildings.

What we use ourselves

If we were buying tomorrow and didn't have a target prefecture yet, our actual workflow would be:

1. Open akiyajapan.com, set a budget filter, browse for a feel.
2. Cross-check anything interesting against LIFULL HOME'S and At Home — do the photos match, is the price the same, has it been listed for two years.
3. Use akiyabanks.com to find the relevant municipal bank and check whether the same listing carries a subsidy or grant on the local side.
4. Once we'd narrowed to a town: book a train ticket, walk the place, talk to a fudosan, see what isn't online.

That's the whole system. Anything else is mostly noise.

We're going to publish one of these guides every day for the next few months. If there's a specific source, prefecture, or buying angle you want covered next, reply to our newsletter — we read every one.

akiyainfo.com publishes general information. We're not lawyers, tax advisors, licensed real estate agents, or immigration specialists. Verify all legal, tax, visa, and contractual matters with a qualified Japanese professional before you sign anything.