A real estate matching site that lists houses for nothing is drawing attention in Japan, where vacant homes with unclear ownership and heavy demolition costs leave owners willing to give them away. The site, Minna no 0-en Bukken, has carried about 3,600 properties in total and closes on just under 80% of them, according to the operator.
Ryo Nakamura, head of the company that runs the site, 0-en Toshi Kaihatsu, traces the business to an inheritance he did not want. His father died in 2018, leaving a two-story shop and residence in Asahikawa, Hokkaido, with neither the land nor the building registered and the boundary with the neighboring property unclear.
Demolition alone would have cost 2.7 million yen, and clearing the stock left from the shop another 400,000 yen. Selling the cleared lot would have brought in less than 500,000 yen, leaving him 2 million to 3 million yen out of pocket, he told FRIDAY. "Honestly, I resented my father," he said.
Nakamura gave the property away instead, handing it and its problems to a businessman preparing to start a company. He set up the site in 2019. Because the sale price is zero, the company earns a flat 298,000 yen closing fee paid by the seller. It does not quote each case individually, which keeps the operation simple and lets it handle a high volume of listings.
Buyers generally pay only about 100,000 yen in registration costs and 10,000 to 20,000 yen a year in fixed asset tax — the levy on land and buildings. Listings jump from early spring, when local governments send out those tax notices, through June, Nakamura said. Owners see the bill and decide they have to do something, he said.
Cheap stock, neglected houses
The site sits at the intersection of two pressures. Japan has a large stock of vacant homes, many in places where demand has faded, and owners who inherit them face registration, boundary and clearance costs that can exceed what the property is worth. Buyers taking them on at zero yen are betting that renovation and rental income will cover the work.
FRIDAY reported that some investors earn as much as 600,000 yen a month through such properties, and that a follow-up article profiles a woman who realized a dream through a zero-yen property and an investor earning that sum. The magazine's November 6, 2026 issue carries the first article.