Review: "Free Houses in Japan" by Anton Wörmann

Free Houses in Japan by Anton Wörmann
Published November 2023 via Anton in Japan Media
★★★

When Wörmann first visited Japan on a modelling contract, he started dreaming—and when he learned of Japan's surplus of akiya, or abandoned houses, that could be bought for a song, he started scheming. What followed was a new sort of adventure: a day job as a model and a passion-project-turned-profitable buying and renovating properties to rent out.

Now, the title is intentionally misleading. The houses aren't free, but they can be very, very cheap (think tens of thousands of dollars rather than hundreds of thousands of dollars), largely because there isn't cultural value for old houses, so they depreciate quickly, and the value is perceived to be in the land. In choosing to renovate rather than tear down and rebuild, Wörmann was going against the Japanese grain, but it paid off for him.

This is not a memoir: it's structured as something of a how-to guide, with the premise that the reader might be interested in buying and renovating their own akiya in Japan. My preference would have been for memoir, because Wormann's story is genuinely interesting, and I have no plans to renovate a house anywhere, let alone in Japan; I love house-restoration memoirs because they let me live vicariously through people who take on that challenge. If you read this, be aware that Wörmann only really gives details of one of the three places he has so far renovated, and even those details are pretty scattered. The focus is much more on challenges that you might not know to expect when buying and renovating a house.

The material is still fascinating, partly because for all the house-restoration memoirs I've read, they've almost all taken place in the west (with, if I remember correctly, the occasional detour to Morocco). The writing is something of a letdown; it's a 300-page book but with perhaps 150 pages of material, because almost every piece of information is delivered at least twice. As an example, when talking about different investment strategies involving akiya, Wormann says: How it works: find and buy an abandoned house in a central urban area, renovate it, and turn it into an Airbnb. ... This strategy works by buying an abandoned house in a central urban area, then renovating it and turning it into an Airbnb (loc. 783). One of the next 'investment strategies' is about manshons, or flats, rather than houses: How it works: find and buy an old condo in a central location, renovate it, and rent it to a long-term tenant without excessive fees (loc. 829). Repeat for buying an abandoned house and renting it out long-term, etc., etc. While it's interesting to think about the pros and cons of long-term rentals vs. Airbnb, and houses vs. flats (e.g., in Japan it's very hard to set up a flat as an Airbnb, because you need permission from everyone in the building), the structure of the book is extremely repetitive. I wish that this had gone through further editing to eliminate the repetition and leave space for more story: to walk us through each of the properties step by step rather than dribbling out scattershot bits of story, to tell us what it actually means to need to retrofit older properties for contemporary earthquake-resistant building standards, to take us through a day or a week in the life.

Recommended if you have insatiable curiosity about house renovation (that's me!) or living in far-off places (also me!) and are a fast reader who can skim through some of the repetition (...also me), but otherwise you might get more satisfaction from just watching a few of Wörmann's YouTube videos.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.