We buy vacant houses in Takayama as they are.

Takayama is the largest city in Japan by area, and vacant houses differ completely between the centre, known for the traditional streets of Sanmachi, and the mountain villages of the former county districts (Nyukawa, Kiyomi, Kuguno, Asahi, Takane, Shokawa, Kamitakara and others). The centre keeps machiya that carry on the work of the Hida craftsmen; the villages keep big-roofed farmhouses that have withstood heavy snow.

In the town centre of the tourist destination Hida Takayama, plenty of people want to turn a house into a guesthouse or a shop. A house in the mountain villages, too, has a chance of being put to use if it's somewhere tourists pass through, like Okuhida Onsengo. We have experience turning a vacant house into lodging for visitors (minpaku). We can also handle running the lodging on your behalf, as a registered management operator. We set the price with an eye to whether the house could work as a guesthouse or shop. For a building in heavy-snow country, the condition of the roof and the frame (the posts-and-beams structure) is what decides the appraisal.

If you want a wider view of the market before selling, see Using the akiya banks. You can talk to us even while your house is listed there.

With tourist demand for its old streets, Takayama is where converting a machiya into an inn or shop is most realistic. In the mountains of Kiyomi, Shokawa and Takane, snow and depopulation are emptying houses, so how a house sells varies wildly within the same city. We price with the conversion prospects included.

Most of Japan's largest city is mountain, and winter in the centre and in the former county districts are two different things. High districts like Shokawa and Takane are among the snowiest and coldest anywhere, and frost damage and snow load strain buildings far beyond anything on the plain. How to get an empty house through the winter is the biggest factor in deciding when to sell.

Around the Sanmachi Important Preservation District for Groups of Traditional Buildings (a nationally designated district that protects an old townscape) there are landscape rules, and work affecting the exterior needs procedures. Restrictions like these limit the buyers for an ordinary sale. But a machiya carrying the skill of the Hida carpenters is the kind of building valued most highly as a guesthouse or shop. As a builder registered as a private-lodging management operator, we appraise a house with an eye to the practical steps of converting it, too.

Farmhouses in the former county districts almost always come with woodland or farmland. Even if you do not know how the land is divided, we start from the cadastral map. The exit for farmland and woodland is set out in How to sell a family home with paddies or woodland.