RetireJapan

I have heard of some amazing stories of dying towns providing cheap houses, or even paying people to come and live there! (mostly rural Japan)

Have you come across any interesting ones/offers?

https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/22/japan-f ... cheap.html

I almost bought one at one point

https://www.retirejapan.com/blog/moving-to-the-country/

Yeah, a nearby town about 20 minutes drive from where I currently live was basically giving a free house to new families. The condition was the family has to be in their 20's, married with a child/children, etc.
Really wanted to take advantage of it, but didn't have a child at the time. Now that I do, there are no more houses available, as far as I know.
However, when looking for cheap houses, if you don't mind houses which are a little older and might need some TLC, then there's usually a page on the town's official website showing empty houses which aren't on the usual housing market websites. I've seen some houses as cheap as 100-200万.
It might be a little difficult and require a bit of digging to find those pages on some towns' websites though.

Rather than purchasing one of these homes, you may care to try renting for a while. We have been doing this since July 2019 and have been very pleased with how it is going so far. Ben was kind enough to re-post an article I wrote recently about this topic (among other related issues) which may be of value: https://ryutokyo.com/2019/12/03/what-is ... untryside/

We found this rental property simply by checking out the local city's website and then contacting the specific office of the town in which we live for more details. They actually "showed" the property to us just like a real estate broker would do, but then we had to contact the landlord on our own to complete the negotiations. We really lucked out, as our landlord is a great guy. The home that we are renting belongs to his 94 year old mother who is now in a nursing home. The land has been in his family for more than 300 years, and the landlord was desperate simply to find somebody willing to live here to keep it up. The rent is very low for the size of the property. Also, there was no charge for shikikin or reikin--just the rent! Thus you can "buy" a lot of time by renting first.

Hope that helps...

Nice article SleighRide, enjoyed reading that.

Thanks for your kind critique.

By the way, while this site is almost all in Japanese, you can use it to find ultra-low rent dwellings that are available for less than 10,000 JPY/month. As the old saying "you get what you pay for" is certainly valid in this case, this level of rent is probably almost too low. You never know, however, as there may be a gem or two hidden among the rest.

https://inakanoseikatsu.com/tag/%E5%AE% ... %E4%B8%8B/