Free appraisal
Sell property in Japan from overseas
A listing written only in Japanese reaches only the people who read Japanese. We are a licensed real estate broker in Kyoto, and we also run short-stay homes here on behalf of the people who own them. When we take a listing, the sales material, the property description and the answers to buyer questions are prepared in Japanese, Chinese and English, so a buyer abroad reads the same file a buyer in Kyoto reads. That is a description of how we work rather than a promise about who turns up.
The appraisal (査定) is free, and asking for one commits you to nothing. If you read it and then list with another firm, that is a normal outcome and we will not chase you about it.
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Who this page is for
One is an owner living in Japan. You may already have the house with a local agent, three or four months in, with viewings that come and go and an asking price that will not hold. We do get inquiries from buyers who live outside Japan: some want a machiya (町家) to live in, some want to take over a guest house that is already trading. Those buyers are hard to reach through Japanese-language portals alone. We prepare the file in three languages so that reaching them does not depend on their Japanese.
Another is an owner of a Kyoto property who lives somewhere else. The house may have been bought a decade ago, or inherited, or run as a guest house until running it stopped being interesting. The sale itself is rarely the hard part. What is hard is the sequence: the registry records (登記簿), the survey drawing, the proration of taxes and utilities, and the closing (決済) itself, all conducted in Japanese, most of it requiring somebody standing in a room in Japan on a particular weekday morning. Our office is in Kyoto, and that is the part we do for you.
The third is an owner whose building holds a license and is still open for business. This is where we differ most from a general agent. When a property carries a lodging business permit (旅館業許可) or a private lodging notification (民泊届出), the price a buyer will pay is only partly about the building. The rest is the license, the trading record behind it, and whether the house keeps earning after the keys change hands.
An agent who takes on that kind of property will often ask the owner to stop taking bookings so the house can be shown, and that happens more often than owners expect. The trading record breaks from that week onward. By the time a buyer is at the table the accounts have a hole in the middle of them, and a record with a hole in it is an argument for a lower price. The buyer will make it.
We do not need the house to close. It is already under our management, so viewings go into the gaps in the booking calendar, the house keeps trading, and the reviews keep accumulating. On the day of closing we hand the operation to the buyer, or keep running it for the new owner if that is what they want. Holding both halves inside one company takes a brokerage license (宅地建物取引業免許) and a residential lodging management registration (住宅宿泊管理業者登録) at the same time, plus the plain fact that the house is ours to run. One caution belongs here, because it is the sentence most easily misread: what transfers cleanly on the day is our management contract, not the permit itself. A lodging business permit does not pass to a buyer automatically with the building, and a private lodging notification is filed in the operator’s own name, so the buyer either applies for succession of status through a business transfer or files again from scratch. Whether that route is open, and how long it takes, is for the public health center with jurisdiction and an administrative scrivener (行政書士) to confirm.
The appraisal is done by a person, not a model
A licensed real estate transaction specialist (宅地建物取引士) does the appraisal on site. We walk the house, look at how it meets the road, check the zoning district (用途地域), and compare what the building registry says with what is actually standing there. A guest house still trading gets one more layer, which is taking the revenue apart line by line instead of accepting a headline figure. The report says where the number came from: which comparable sales we used, what adjustments we made to them, and why this house sits above or below the one down the street.
This is not a courtesy we invented. Article 34-2, paragraph 2 of the Real Estate Brokerage Act (宅地建物取引業法) requires an agent who offers an opinion on price to state the basis for it. The other practice in this trade is old and familiar: quote high to win the mediation agreement (媒介契約), sit on the listing for three months, then come back and explain why the price has to come down. Since the law asks for a basis, we would rather give more of one than less. The report is yours to keep, and taking it to a second firm is a reasonable thing to do with it.
An appraised value is our reading of the market, and it is not the price you will sign. Where the number lands depends on who the buyer turns out to be, when you sell, and how long you are willing to wait. We put that caveat next to the number instead of in a footnote, because the number is the part people remember. Anyone who opens with a figure and a promise attached to it is worth one more question about what the promise rests on.
The money and the duties, before anything is signed
Most of the numbers below reach an owner for the first time after the paperwork is done. We would rather put them in front of you while you are still choosing an agent. Some are set by statute and some are ours to decide. Where a figure is our own policy rather than the law, we say so.
Brokerage commission, and a rule that only touches low-priced houses
The statutory ceiling has a shortcut formula behind it. Where the sale price is above 4 million yen, the ceiling is three percent of the whole price plus 60,000 yen, plus consumption tax. On a 30 million yen sale that comes to 960,000 yen before tax, and 1,056,000 yen with it. The three percent runs on the full price and not on the slice above 4 million, which is the common misreading and an expensive one. The law sets only the ceiling; what is actually charged is a matter for the agreement. Ours is the ceiling, which is what agents here generally charge. Where the low-price rule below applies we say so, explain it and ask for your agreement, all before the mediation agreement is signed.
A change made in July 2024 has not traveled far yet. Where the sale price is 8 million yen or less, excluding consumption tax, the ceiling on the agent’s remuneration can be raised to 300,000 yen plus consumption tax, which is 330,000 yen in total, provided the agent explains this and obtains your agreement before the mediation agreement is signed. Plenty of Kyoto machiya sell inside that band. You are more likely to meet the rule here than in most of Japan.
The direction of that change matters, because it lifts a ceiling and does not lower a cost. Under the old formula an agent selling a 5 million yen house could charge at most 210,000 yen plus tax, which does not cover the site visits and the registry work, and that is why houses in this band sat unsold with nobody willing to take them on. Somebody will take them on now, and the price of that is that you may pay more than the old formula would have produced. The rule has the word akiya (空家, vacant house) in its name but it turns on price alone, so whether anyone is living in the house makes no difference to whether it applies. Using it at all, and the amount, must be explained and agreed before the mediation agreement is signed, and it cannot be applied afterwards.
Non-resident sellers: the buyer withholds 10.21 percent
Owners living abroad tend to hear about this on the morning of the closing. If you are a non-resident for Japanese tax purposes, the buyer is required to deduct withholding tax of 10.21 percent from the purchase price and pay it straight to the tax office. The Japanese term is gensen choshu (源泉徴収), and it is the buyer’s legal obligation rather than a choice either side makes. What reaches your account that day is therefore a little over a tenth short of the contract figure.
The money is not gone. It is tax paid in advance, settled later through a final tax return (確定申告), which ends in a refund or a further payment depending on the year. The cash flow is genuinely short on the day, and that matters if a remaining mortgage has to be cleared at the closing table or if you are converting currency at a fixed rate. There is one exception: no withholding applies where the buyer is an individual purchasing the property as a residence for themselves or a relative and the price is 100 million yen or less. Which side of that line you fall on is a question for a tax accountant (税理士), and we will introduce one if you want.
Stamp duty, mortgage release, survey, tax on the gain
Stamp duty (印紙税) is paid by affixing stamps to the sale contract, on a scale set by the contract amount, and a reduction measure currently applies. Depending on the price it runs from a few thousand yen to a few tens of thousands, with the current schedule governing. If a mortgage is still registered against the property, the registration has to be canceled: registration and license tax (登録免許税) is 1,000 yen per property, and land and building count separately, so a house with land under it comes to 2,000 yen, with the judicial scrivener (司法書士) fee on top. Where the boundaries are unclear, or where the buyer asks for it, a survey is needed. Old Kyoto houses run into that often, and irregularly shaped machiya plots more often still.
The last of these is the tax on the gain (譲渡所得税). Held for more than five years, the rate is 20.315 percent; held for five years or less, 39.63 percent. Both figures are the combined burden of income tax, the special reconstruction income tax and resident tax, and the resident tax portion is levied in the year following the sale rather than at the closing, so part of the bill arrives long after the money has moved. The holding period is counted back from January 1 of the year in which you sell rather than from the actual date, and houses do fall into the higher bracket by a matter of days. A property you have lived in has a special deduction available; whether an investment property or a guest house qualifies for anything depends on the facts, which is again a tax accountant’s call and not ours.
Three mediation agreements, and what each one obliges us to do
The first document in a sale is the mediation agreement, and choosing among the three types settles more than whether you may also instruct another firm. Each type carries a different statutory duty on the agent’s side, written into the Real Estate Brokerage Act rather than into our own terms. What follows is therefore not a service menu. It is a list of things you can hold an agent to, ourselves included.
A general mediation agreement (一般媒介契約) lets you instruct several firms at once, and lets you sell directly to a buyer you found yourself. What you give up is the statutory scaffolding. There is no legal requirement to register the property with the designated distribution organization (指定流通機構), the industry-wide database known as REINS (レインズ), and no required reporting interval. Where a house sits on several firms’ books at once, none of them knows whether the work they put in will end up being someone else’s commission, and the effort tends to follow that logic.
An exclusive mediation agreement (専任媒介契約) confines the instruction to us, while still leaving you free to deal directly with a buyer you found yourself. The statutory term is capped at three months. We have to register the property with REINS within seven days of the agreement, not counting our closed days, and report to you at least once every two weeks. Those are duties rather than service promises, and they hold whether the sale is going well or badly.
An exclusive right-to-sell mediation agreement (専属専任媒介契約) goes a step further, in that even a buyer you find yourself has to transact through us. The duties tighten in step. The term is likewise capped at three months, REINS registration falls due within five days of the agreement excluding closed days, and the reports come at least once a week. It asks the most of us and allows you the least, which is the trade the statute intends.
These periods and frequencies come from the Real Estate Brokerage Act, which makes them a measuring stick you already hold. If you signed an exclusive agreement and no REINS registration certificate (登録済証明書) has reached you, or if two weeks go by without a report, the problem is not attentiveness. A statutory duty is going unmet, and raising it is fair with any agent, ourselves included. Ask for the certificate. It exists, and it has a date on it.
What we are weak at, said first
We are a small team. Our brokerage license was granted in April 2026, Kyoto Governor (1) No. 15131 (京都府知事(1)第15131号). The figure in brackets counts license terms rather than rank, so a (1) tells anyone in the trade that we are in our first five-year term. The next line is ours to say before you find it elsewhere: we have not yet closed a single brokerage transaction. There is no sold-count on this page because there is nothing yet to count.
The other half of the business is older. We have run short-stay homes in Kyoto since 2019, sixteen of them at present, twelve holding lodging business permits and four operating as notified private lodgings. More than twenty houses have been under our management over those years. Guests have left more than 850 reviews across them, averaging 4.97. An owner can move to another management company at any time. So far none has.
The questions a buyer of this kind of property asks are the ones we settle as operators, week after week: whether a van can turn into the lane, whether the zoning district will support a permit at all, what cleaning and linen actually cost across a month, and how far the peak season sits above the trough. None of that is in the property file. It sits with whoever has run a house on that street, and on sixteen Kyoto streets that happens to be us. When a buyer raises one of those questions at a viewing, the answer does not have to be looked up.
Being new at brokerage is a fact, and dressing it up would be worse than saying it. What we do about it sits on the other side of the ledger: the sales file is written three times over, in Japanese, Chinese and English; a house we already run does not have to stop trading in order to be shown; and an operating question from a buyer is answered by the people doing the operating. None of the three depends on how long we have held the license. Judge us on those, because the transaction count is not there to be judged.
Free appraisal
Fill in what you can and we will come back to you once we have looked at it. The appraisal is free. You take on no obligation to instruct us afterwards, and we will not add you to a call list. Leave any field blank if it does not apply or you do not know the answer.
Where the property is (ward and neighborhood name is enough; the street number can wait)
Layout and rough size (number of rooms, floor area, land area, as much as you know)
Current use (your own home / rented out / trading as a guest house / vacant)
Licensing (lodging business permit / private lodging notification / neither / not sure)
When you are thinking of selling (decided to sell / within six months / within a year / just want the number)
How to reach you (name, and an email address or phone number)
Messaging app you actually use (WhatsApp / LINE / WeChat / email)
The last field is not small talk. WhatsApp and LINE both feed into one inbox on our side, so whichever you pick is the one our reply comes back on, and you will not have to install anything to talk to us.
Sending the form means you agree to our handling of the personal information in it. We use what you send to prepare the appraisal, to discuss a mediation agreement, to introduce properties or buyers where that is relevant, and to answer your inquiry. We do not sell it or hand it to third parties for their own marketing. The full statement is on our privacy policy page at /privacy.
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Company
081 K.K. (081株式会社), trading as Moogo. Corporate number 1130001062133. Representative Director: Icy.
Brokerage license
Kyoto Governor (1) No. 15131 (京都府知事(1)第15131号). Valid April 24, 2026 to April 23, 2031. Two staff, one full-time licensed real estate transaction specialist.
Guarantee association
公益社団法人 全国宅地建物取引業保証協会, the nationwide guarantee association for licensed real estate brokers.
Residential lodging management operator
Minister of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (01) No. F03122. Valid January 19, 2024 to January 18, 2029.
Office
43-3-1F Arashiyama Uchidacho, Nishikyo Ward, Kyoto 616-0027. Telephone 075-600-0776.
The tax rates, remuneration ceilings and contractual duties described on this page follow published law as of August 2026. How any of it applies to a particular sale is for a tax accountant, a judicial scrivener or an administrative scrivener to determine. An appraised value is an opinion and not a guarantee that a sale will close at that price. Transferring a lodging business permit or a private lodging notification requires a separate administrative procedure, and whether that route is open rests with the public health center with jurisdiction.