Vasat Vita Office and Residence / Vuumaatra Consultants
Text description provided by the architects. Built-in the rapidly growing urban settings of Aftabnagar, an area of eastern Dhaka, the project represents the true aesthetics of a contextual, cultural landscape incorporating local materials and artisans with a blend of sustainable design features. The building serves as both a residence and a design studio for the architect, spanning three stories and nestled in a modest plot of approximately 200 square meters. Despite space constraints, the challenge was embraced as an opportunity to create a serene haven amidst the urban chaos.
As visitors step inside, they are greeted by a humble yet inviting open space. This design choice reflects the client’s dual role as both visionary and architect, driven by a personal dream of preserving a patch of land for family sports, e.g., badminton matches during winter. Spatial distribution unfolds gradually, transitioning from more public realms to intimate, private spaces as one ascends vertically and sideways parallelly.
Drawing Inspiration from the principles of Vaastu Shastra, the layout unfolds within 9 square grids, with the central grid serving as an open-to-sky courtyard to enhance positive energy flow. This courtyard, along with a waterbody, also functions as a micro-climatic passive cooling feature, ensuring a comfortable living environment with ample natural light and ventilation throughout the space. The ground floor houses the architect’s design studio with an open workspace. The ceiling incorporates a waffle slab construction method, integrating traditional clay pots as fillers. An open entryway welcomes the building and a visually interesting protruded volume is cantilevered from the main building.
The architectural approach incorporates passive cooling strategies, utilizing energy transfer to achieve temperatures lower than those in the surrounding environment. The selection of building materials was guided by cultural appropriateness, local availability and sustainable factors. Brick was most suitable for this and concretes were used for structural members.
The building is enveloped in a simple perforated façade, inspired by the designer’s nostalgic memories of the architectural motif found in his childhood. These perforations offer a personal touch while also efficiently managing solar heat, ensuring abundant natural light and ventilation. Glass surfaces are consciously brought inside as the secondary layer to the perforated brick façade. So the sun cannot directly hit the glass surface. As a result, the inside temperature is cooler than the outside in summer. A layer of greenery planted between the brick façade and glass windows provides a calming element for the occupants. Adding a layer of nature in the interior was intentional since it enhances both the environmental performance and the well-being of the building’s occupants. Focus was given on integrating nature into the project and it highlights the importance of designing spaces closely connected to nature for sustainable living.
In conclusion, the project demonstrates a commitment to sustainable design principles, integrating local materials, passive cooling strategies, and innovative structural solutions. The sensitively crafted use of space, emphasis on energy efficiency, and consideration for cultural, historical, and environmental factors showcase a holistic approach to sustainable architecture.
British house prices fell by 1.4 per cent on an annual basis in December, after a revised 2.3 per cent decrease in November.
London was the region with the biggest annual decrease with prices in the capital falling by 4.8 per cent, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said on Wednesday.
“Our initial estimate of UK house prices shows another annual fall in December, however the pace of decrease has slowed since the previous month,” said Aimee North, head of housing market indices at the ONS.
Wednesday’s data contrasted with some other measures of Britain’s housing market which showed house prices rose in January as demand picked up after mortgage rates fell.
Other reports on the data indicated UK house prices rose for the first time in four months at the end of last year.
The average price of a home rose to £284,691 (€333,813) in December, a 0.1 per cent rise compared to the previous month.
The figures suggest the housing market may be past the worst after a marked cooling in mortgage rates in recent months. More forward-looking industry data from lenders Halifax and Nationwide Building Society have already pointed to prices rebounding.
The ONS said prices fell 1.4 per cent in the 12 months to December, with the market defying predictions of a slump triggered by 14 back-to-back interest-rate rises by the Bank of England. It was still the worst year for the property market since 2008 when the financial crisis triggered a 15 per cent decline.
“December saw demand pick up as mortgage rates decreased and 2024 has started with a tsunami of enthusiasm and enquiries from potential homebuyers,” said Stephen Perkins, managing director at broker Yellow Brick Mortgages.
“Though this data shows prices are down on an annual basis, it paints a picture of how the market was several months previously, and the picture now is really quite different.” – Reuters, Bloomberg
There are two things the prime minister needs to get into his head about tax. One is that saying he won’t make any further changes no longer works. The other is that negative gearing doesn’t do much to get people into homes.
Anthony Albanese seemed to have taken the first point on board when he spoke to Insiders on Sunday.
Rather than promising flat out not to change the rules around negative gearing, he merely said he was “supportive of the current rules, we have not considered changes to them”.
But he was less careful when it came to the virtues of negative gearing. He said there was “a whole lot of analysis that says they encourage investment in housing, the key when it comes to housing is housing supply”.
His official advisers in the treasury don’t think negative gearing does much to increase the supply of supply of housing – or, if they do, they omitted it from the six-page briefing note headed “negative gearing“, prepared to help the treasurer answer questions about it in parliament.
Our rules reward bad management
Negative gearing is a particularly Australian tax benefit, which – unlike in other countries – benefits dud landlords: those who can’t make money by renting out properties.
If they lose money (by paying out more in interest, maintenance and other expenses than they are receiving in rent) we let them offset that loss, not only against income from other investments, but also against income from their wage or salary.
It means they can cut their wage for tax purposes, cutting the tax they pay on it. And at the same time, they can hang on to a property they can later sell for a profit, which will be taxed at only half the normal rate, thanks to Australia’s 50 per cent discount on capital gains.
It isn’t allowed in the United Kingdom or the United States. There, if you are a landlord who can’t make money, you can offset your losses against profits from other investments – but not against your wage.
In Canada you can offset rental losses against wages, but there must have been an “an intention to make a profit”. That would probably rule out most Australian negative gearers.
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Most gearers don’t build homes
In Australia, an astounding astounding one million of us negatively gear – more than one in nine taxpayers. In 2020-21 they claimed losses amounting to $8.7 billion – 3.5 per cent of the income tax collected – meaning that if they didn’t do it (if they didn’t claim for what seem to be deliberate losses) the rest of us could pay less tax.
What Albanese said on the weekend was half right. Negative gearing encourages investment. Most months, more than one in three new home loans is for an investment property.
But most of those loans don’t increase supply – the thing Albanese says matters.
That’s because the overwhelming bulk of investor home loans go to “investors” planning to buy existing homes – to bid against and likely beat would-be owner-occupiers.
In December 2023, only 23 per cent of the loans to investors was used to build a home or buy a newly-build home. In November only 19 per cent.
As a means of getting more homes built, negative gearing leaks like a sieve. As a means of ensuring Australians continue to rent, rather than buy, it’s effective.
In the 20 or so years since the headline rate of capital gains tax was halved, supercharging negative gearing, the proportion of Australian households renting has climbed from 26 per cent to 30 per cent. If those extra renters become owners, an extra 400,000 Australians would be in homes they could call their own.
How to get better value from gearing
The really bizarre thing is that Albanese has it in his power to ensure negative gearing does exactly what he said it did – supercharge the building of houses.
All he would need to do is what Labor promised to do in 2016 and again in 2019. In those elections, Bill Shorten went to voters promising to limit the use of negative gearing to newly-built homes.
As Shorten put it, taxpayers would :continue to be able to deduct net rental losses against their wage income, providing the losses come from newly constructed housing”.
The sieve would no longer leak. Every dollar of tax lost to a negative gearer would help build a home.
What would have happened if Shorten had got his way: if Australia both focused the use of negative gearing and cut the capital gains discount as he had proposed?
Modelling just published in Australian Economic Papers finds the share of households who own their home rather than renting it would have climbed 4.7 per cent.
That’s security worth having, especially if it is accompanied by more homes.
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An idea whose time is coming?
Australia’s Treasury has begun publishing estimates of the cost of the present unfocused system of negative gearing. Its latest, released last week, puts the cost at $2.7 billion per year, to which should probably be added a chunk of the $19 billion per year lost as a result of the capital gains concession.
The estimates are new. Until Jim Chalmers became treasurer, his department didn’t publish estimates of the cost of rental deductions.
Chalmers is far from the first treasurer to be curious about what the concession does. Scott Morrison expressed concern about the “excesses” of negative gearing.
And Morrison’s predecessor, Joe Hockey, said on leaving parliament that negative gearing should be skewed towards new housing, so “there is an incentive to add to the housing stock rather than an incentive to speculate on existing property”.
Albanese is normally cautious. But as he is showing us right with his rejigged Stage 3 tax cuts, there are times when he is not.
If he really wants to throw everything he has got at building more homes, he knows what to do.
Peter Martin is visiting fellow at the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University. This article originally appeared on The Conversation.
A real estate agent who has been criticised as ‘tone deaf’ for making sales videos for modest homes while driving high-end luxury cars has defended his methods after attracting thousands of views online.
Agent Amir Jahan, 25, from Ray White Parramatta in Sydney‘s west, has racked up hundreds of thousands of views for the videos he posts to Instagram spruiking his properties.
His videos include Mr Jahan arriving at lower to mid-end properties in luxury vehicles including a Rolls Royce and a Lamborghini.
Mr Jahan’s slickly produced clips have attracted comments slamming his style for being ‘tone deaf’ and ‘douchey’.
‘I get a lot of negative comments but what’s most important for me is to keep the sellers and buyers happy,’ he told Daily Mail Australia.
After starting as a sales agent five months ago, Mr Jahan knew he needed to market his properties from a different perspective.
‘I remember before I became an agent I saw all the real estate videos that all looked the same with the agent standing outside, saying ‘welcome home’ and I would skip through them,’ he said.
‘I asked ‘what can I do to make the videos different?’ Nine out of 10 people like cars, so I decided to put cars in the videos.
‘I wanted to get people’s attention and get them to watch them to the end.’
Many of his videos have been watched over 100,000 times, with one he shared to X hitting half a million views.
Far from being ‘douchey’, Mr Jahan revealed one of the main reasons for the videos was because of the Parramatta market being mainly ‘all units’.
‘When a house comes on the market, people are interested.
‘But because there are just so many units you have to do something to try and get them sold, otherwise they sit on the market for six months.’
According to Mr Jahan, the average time a unit stays on the market in Parramatta is a minimum of 60 days.
He says savvier agents who use platforms like Instagram to market properties have sold after an average of just four weeks on the market.
The agent said 10 units come onto the market in his area every fortnight, with most being apartments.
‘They have the same number of bedrooms, they are the same price, they are targeting the same market. You have to do something different,’ Mr Jahan said.
Mr Jahan said some people accuse him of ‘ripping’ off his vendors – but he pays for the marketing out of his own pocket.
‘Most properties I sign I offer free marketing. The cost of the videos are covered by me, including car rentals,’ he said.
The vendors he does offer a marketing package involves the seller paying for advertising on Domain and realestate.com.au and nothing more.
‘I don’t believe in taking commission and marketing costs.
‘Since I started as a seller, I believe when an owner signs with you, that is a big trust to give their asset to you.’
Mr Jahan also believes that just because a property doesn’t have a big price tag, doesn’t mean it shouldn’t get his full attention.
‘If I am selling a $400,000 – $500,000 unit, and turn up in a $1m car, there’s a reason for it,’ he said.
‘I’m not listing a property for $7m or $8m but I am treating your property like it is $7 or $8m dollars.
‘I am putting my focus on it regardless of the fact that we are not in Double Bay and your flat isn’t in the millions. It is still a big asset for the owner.’
His latest post on Instagram of a three bedroom townhouse has attracted negative comments , with some describing it as ‘s***hole’.
‘Good place to run meth out of,’ wrote one.
‘The car’s worth more than the apartment! I’m confused, are you an agent or a car salesperson?’ another said.
‘The meaning of out of touch,’ one wrote.
Mr Jahan told Daily Mail Australia the negative comments just fuel his motivation.
‘It’s life. It doesn’t matter how good or bad you are, you will always get negative comments,’ he said.
His social media campaigns have worked. Out of the 14 properties he has sold, four have been directly linked to his videos.
‘One man contacted me after seeing a video on Instagram. He had been looking for a while and came and saw the property. He made an offer on the same day.’
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When the Federal Reserve began jacking up interest rates in 2022, home sales cratered almost overnight; inventory dried up; the housing market “froze.” People who have mortgages with interest rates below 4 percent—which is more than 60 percent of homeowners—aren’t going anywhere. They’re not selling their houses. They’re staying put.
The current availability of homes for sale is about 36 percent lower than before the pandemic; this past October, home sales dropped to their lowest level in more than 13 years, and in November, the share of homebuyers looking to relocate to a different metro area was at its lowest level in 18 months. People who own homes have become so reluctant to move that they’re likely to pass up job offers in other cities, one study found.
If swapping a low mortgage for a much higher one is plainly undesirable, the way out of the problem—and into a new space—seems plainly obvious: renting. Now is a terrible time to buy a home, but renting would allow more Americans to relocate without becoming “house poor” at a 7 percent interest rate. A rental home could help a growing family break free of a too-small starter house. A national renting trend, in which owners put up their homes for rent and become renters themselves, could unfreeze the whole market.
“Why not just rent?” is a question I’ve asked myself (and my husband, and our real-estate agent) many times over the past couple of years, as we’ve tried and failed to sell our house and buy a new one. After a long day of touring gross, overpriced homes that would require thousands of dollars of renovation, all for double the interest rate we have now, I’d mutter, Why don’t we just rent a house instead of buying one of these dumps? Every time, they reacted like I’d suggested we live on an ice floe in the middle of the North Sea. Rent?
It turns out that deep cultural, regulatory, and financial incentives prod Americans toward the “homeownership ladder” and, once they’re on it, discourage them from hopping off. Although renting is often not any financially or psychologically worse than owning—in fact, it might be quite the opposite—renting after owning is just not something most Americans want to do.
It’s not that nobody wants to rent, of course. Demand for rental homes is healthy: In fact, rentals are becoming the new starter homes, as many would-be first-time buyers, who can’t afford to buy at today’s interest rates, rent houses instead. “Instead of moving from apartment to ownership, you move from apartment to renting a house and later on to ownership,” says Nicole Bachaud, a senior economist at Zillow.
But about 70 percent of people who sold a house recently also bought a home, according to a report by Zillow. (That doesn’t mean the other 30 percent all rented—they might have moved in with family, moved into a retirement home, or moved into another home they also own.) “Very, very few people make that transition back into renting,” Lu Liu, a finance professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told me.
Say someone does currently own a home at a low mortgage rate and wants to move. The first question would be what to do with that home. Financially, the ideal is to hold on to that house—and rate—for as long as possible. “Giving up a 3 percent mortgage in a 6.5 percent interest-rate environment is the equivalent of giving up 15 or 20 percent of home value,” Chris Mayer, a real-estate professor at Columbia University, told me. Nevertheless, renting your home out can be expensive and annoying. “You get a call at 7 a.m.—the hot-water heater is broken,” Mayer said. “Being a landlord is not that much fun or that easy.”
What’s more, the federal government, through regulations and incentives, practically begs Americans to buy homes, not rent them: Homeowners benefit from a slew of tax deductions that aren’t available to renters. Rents can increase, but fixed-rate mortgages never do. “During the pandemic, house prices went up by a lot, and that was very painful for renters and people who are trying to get onto the housing ladder,” Liu said. “But it wasn’t necessarily a problem for people who were already owning a house.” That means homeowners are shielded from inflation, their house payments a relic of the year in which they bought their home. Even if a current homeowner did opt to rent instead, they might find that typical rents are now even higher than their mortgage payment.
It’s not just fixed rates that make homeownership feel more stable than renting. In most cities and circumstances, a renter can get kicked out by a landlord who wants to move back into their house, or who simply wants to charge more rent. If you have kids, that raises the stakes of renting: What if they’re in a school they love, and the landlord decides you need to vacate?
Finally, homeownership has a firm hold on the American psyche—a preference that isn’t entirely rational. Though owning a home is often a good way to build wealth in the long run, in the short term, owners are on the hook for any repairs the home needs, which can be extremely costly.
Homeowners aren’t necessarily any happier than renters—one study of women in Ohio even found that homeowners are more miserable because they spend less time with their friends. But along with parenthood and marathons, it seems like one of those things that doesn’t make us happy but that we do anyway. “Homeownership in America is an ideal,” Daryl Fairweather, the chief economist of Redfin, told me. “And the ideal is that you don’t have a landlord, and you are the king of your own castle.” People want to paint the walls whatever color they wish—even if we all end up painting them Mindful Gray. We just want the option.
Perhaps more Americans would rent if renting weren’t so precarious. In countries where protections for renters are stronger, more middle-class people see renting as a long-term option for their family rather than as a temporary solution in their 20s. Take Germany, where only about 45 percent of households own, compared with two-thirds in the United States. There, landlords can’t terminate a rental contract for just any reason, and it’s extremely difficult for landlords to raise the rent. As a landlord you might “like to have a long-term renter leave, but you can’t,” Leo Kaas, an economist at Goethe University Frankfurt, told me. Rental contracts are open-ended, Kaas said, and that “makes it much more attractive for individuals in the first place to rent.” Some Germans move into low-income housing and stay there for years, even as their incomes rise and they technically no longer qualify.
For now, my husband and I have reached a détente in which I stare at Zillow rentals and he stares at Redfin’s for-sale listings. Neither of us much likes what’s on offer. So far, we’ve been doing what other homeowners have been doing: not moving.
The number of properties subject to land tax in Queensland has jumped more than 10 per cent in the past financial year as the value of land continues to rise.
Key points:
- Thousands more Queensland properties are falling under the state’s land tax regime amid rising land values
- The Real Estate Institute of Queensland wants the $600,000 land tax threshold to increase with inflation
- The state government says indexing the threshold would cost the budget $200 million per year in revenue
In Queensland, individuals are charged land tax when the total land value of their investment properties is worth $600,000 or more.
The $600,000 threshold has remained unchanged since 2007, which is something the Real Estate Institute of Queensland (REIQ) objects to.
The stakeholder group, which advocates for property investors, wants the threshold to increase in line with inflation, suggesting the unchanged threshold is leading to a kind of bracket creep.
But the state government has hit back at the proposal, insisting that indexing the threshold would cost the state budget as much as $200 million per year in revenue.
New figures from the Queensland Revenue Office show that in the 2022-23 financial year, 175,556 properties were subject to land tax — up from 157,485 the year before.
The number of individuals who were liable to pay land tax after exceeding the $600,000 threshold also increased from 34,021 in 2021-22 to more than 44,000 in 2022-23.
The increase in properties falling under the land tax regime comes amid rising land valuations across the state.
In Brisbane, for example, Queensland’s valuer-general determined that land values increased by 17.5 per cent in 2022, followed by another 11.9 per cent jump in 2023.
In Ipswich, land values climbed 23.1 per cent in 2022, followed by another increase of 33 per cent in 2023.
The Queensland Revenue Office has also confirmed it issued 19,382 land tax exemptions to first-time taxpayers in 2022-23, which was up from the 12,340 issued the year before.
‘Massive windfall’
REIQ chief executive Antonia Mercorella suggested said the existing situation had led to bracket creep and said REIQ wanted the threshold to be indexed in line with CPI.
“It’s logical that we are seeing thousands more properties being subject to the land tax regime because of course we know that the median price of property has gone up significantly,” she said.
“This represents a massive windfall for the state government and, certainly, we have been saying for many years that it really is time to review that threshold.
“Our concern is that land tax does act as a fairly significant deterrent for investment. And of course, there is an argument that inevitably that land tax bill gets passed onto the renter.”
In a statement, Deputy Premier and Treasurer Cameron Dick said Queensland had one of the most generous land tax thresholds in the country.
He also pointed out that the tax did not apply to the family home.
“Queensland collects less than half as much in land tax per capita as New South Wales or Victoria. This revenue funds the frontline,” he said.
“Queensland Treasury forecasts that the cost of indexing land tax would reach more than $200 million in forgone revenue each year from 2025-26.
“Anyone proposing that land tax be cut would need to identify what services or jobs would be cut to pay for that loss of revenue.”
The latest figures in Queensland’s mid-year budget showed the state government made $1.73 billion from land tax in 2022-23, which was a $99 million increase from 2021-22.
And the revenue was tipped to grow even further this financial year to $2.03 billion, and then reach $2.32 billion by 2024-25.
While the land tax threshold for individuals sits at $600,000, for companies and trusts it is set at a lower $350,000.
The threshold for companies and trusts also has not changed since 2007.
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- In Japan, homes where a death has occurred carry a stigma that can make the home hard to sell.
- But some agents are making a career out of getting these “stigmatized” properties off the market.
- One expert estimates that some of these houses can have their prices reduced by as much as 50%.
The first time Koji Hanahara stepped into one of Japan’s “stigmatized properties,” it was the scene of a lonely death. An elderly man had died alone in his apartment, and his body was only discovered two months later.
It was unnerving, but it reminded Hanahara of why he chose to do what he did. As the CEO of Marks Co., a Japanese real-estate company that specializes in cleaning, renovating, and selling stigmatized properties, it’s his job to get these houses back onto the market again — despite their history.
“I thought I should be the one to do it. At that time, I realized again that it is my mission to help as many people as possible,” Hanahara told Insider.
Building a business around ‘accident properties’ that are hard to sell
The term “jiko bukken” — which translates to “stigmatized property” or “accident property” — is most commonly used to describe a property where a suicide, murder, or natural death has occurred.
“In Japan, it is said that there are about 30,000 lonely deaths at home, about 13,000 suicides a year, and about 2,000 homicides and fire deaths a year, making it a total of 45,000,” Hanahara said. “Not all these properties are rented or sold, but the current situation is that there are a large number of accident properties.”
Not only can these houses be hard to clean, but the stigma makes them almost impossible to sell.
“In Japan, many people have the impression that accident properties are ‘scary,’ ‘ghostly,’ and ‘dirty,’ which makes them exclude accident properties when choosing real estate,” Hanahara said.
While most real-estate agents want to avoid sharing grisly details, Hanahara does quite the opposite.
After working at a construction company for residential homes, Hanahara started his own real-estate agency, Marks Co., in 2016. He pivoted to specializing in stigmatized properties in 2019.
The listing information on his company’s site, Jobutsu Real Estate, includes a room description and details of how and when the previous owner died. “Suicide in December 2018” reads one listing currently available for 26.8 million yen, or $194,857. “The former owner died indoors in 2014” reads another that’s on the market for 21.8 million yen.
Cheaper to rent or buy
Despite the stigma that’s attached to these houses, there’s a big plus point for buyers and renters: price.
Hanahara estimates that properties where lonely deaths have occurred tend to have prices reduced by 5 to 10%, while houses where suicides have occurred tend to have prices reduced by 20 to 30%. The prices of houses where murders have occurred can be reduced by as much as 50%, he added.
On the Jobutsu site, a 29-square-meter stigmatized condo apartment in Shinagawa-ku, Tokyo, costs 21.8 million yen. A non-stigmatized condo of the same size in the same location costs 27.6 million yen, per data from the Japanese real-estate platform Utinokati.
For some young families, the cheap rent is attractive. Kasia Pawlus-Ono, a Polish stay-at-home mom, moved to Japan from Australia with her Japanese husband and their daughter in 2019.
They lived in a stigmatized property in Hanamigawa, in the Chiba prefecture, from March 2019 to May 2021. The former tenant was a young mother who had died in the house, Pawlus-Ono said.
“It was around 25,000 yen when it was half-priced,” Pawlus-Ono told Insider. “We paid one year of the rent basically up forward, because it was half price from the original because of the stigmatized property status.”
In contrast, the average monthly rent for an apartment in Hanamigawa is 56,084 yen, per Utinokati.
“I would say it was a positive experience because our neighbors were fine. It also seemed like they were quite happy that someone moved in because for them it was strange that it was empty for so long,” Pawlus-Ono said. She added that her rent went back its regular price — about 50,000 yen — after a year.
Rent may recover over time, but it doesn’t mean agents no longer have to notify future tenants about the incident. Japan’s Building Lots and Buildings Transaction Business Law prohibits realtors from intentionally withholding facts about the properties they’re selling, Hanahara said. And in October, new guidelines from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism specified that brokers must disclose deaths if they had been well-known incidents, involved foul play, or have a significant decision-making impact. Realtors must also disclose all past deaths, regardless of their nature, if tenants ask.
Scott Rothman, a technical director from the United States, moved into a stigmatized studio apartment in Shibuya, Tokyo, in September 2017. He lived there for slightly over three years.
“I got I think two free months of rent and the rent was quite discounted,” Rothman told Insider. “The value was way better than I ever could have actually afforded and I even got a couple of free appliances out of it.”
The previous tenant was an older woman who had died of natural causes in the house, Rothman said: “I was weighing the pros and cons of the apartment when I thought, ‘People have to die somewhere? What’s the difference?'”
How to find stigmatized properties in Japan
People can also find stigmatized properties in Japan on a website called Oshimaland.
The site maps stigmatized properties and provides the details and date of the incident that occurred there. However, it’s not an official record; anyone can submit entries to the site, website creator Teru Oshima told Insider.
“Landlords have an incentive to check the website since everything that’s written on it has a negative impact on the prices of their assets,” Oshima said. “They can send me emails, post comments, send direct messages through Twitter or Facebook or any other route to contact me to correct the information if it’s not true.”
Marks Co. receives about two to three notifications about potential property listings in a day, most of which come directly from the relatives of the deceased. The company also works with funeral houses and special cleaning companies to look for more properties, Hanahara said.
In terms of tenants, he’s noticed a trend of people in their 20s and 30s, single mothers, and single women living in stigmatized houses. And while the discounted pricing is one reason these apartments can be appealing — Tokyo, for example, is the fourth-most expensive city in the world to purchase property — it’s not only about money.
“When you think of living in an accident property, you may have the idea that you are choosing the accident property because you have no money,” Hanahara said. But the property might have other appealing perks, such as being located near public transport or in a new building, he added.
Some real-estate agents have reservations about dealing with stigmatized properties.
“I know there is certain demand, but it’s really risky,” Yuki Yanagita, a sales representative from real-estate company J&F Plaza, told Insider. J&F Plaza specializes in helping foreigners find property in Japan.
Along with a smaller pool of buyers, the cost of deep cleaning the house is borne by the agency — something not every company is willing to take on, Yanagita said. People in Japan often also closely associate stigmatized properties with the paranormal, he added.
But as for Hanahara, his goal is step in and handle exactly the stage of the process that others stay away from.
“We will help those who are willing to sell their accident property right from the stage when the accident occurred,” Hanahara said.