My List.

Some small changes this month. The "My List" section, which is available to our subscribers, has undergone a small improvement including sorting by property features. We will continue to improve this area into the future. If you would like to see something here, please contact us. We have also improved a few things to do with the search, such as repositioning the "order by" selector and adding Buy/Rent options in the search filters. We hope this improves your experience of the search!

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Handle your real world Japanese communications online

This month, in our ongoing support for local Japanese businesses who wish to help you through the purchase process, we're delighted to introduce MailMate. This is a bilingual service that can help Expats, Business owners, and Real Estate owners handle tax representative paperwork, set up your property's utilities, pay bills, and more. MailMate can even help Enterprise customers set up a Japanese business address and provide a representative to answer Japanese language calls. For more information please check them out at MailMate.jp

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Local Help

This month our friends at BridgetoJapan were featured on "ONLY in JAPAN * GO" where they showcased their fabulous home in the beautiful Shikoku countryside. Check it out here.

Having been through the akiya hunt and purchase process themselves, they would be happy to share their knowledge with anyone who plans to travel or relocate to Shikoku. We've been so impressed by their active efforts to help their local community that they inspired us to add a "Local Help" tab for any property listing you find in Shikoku.

BridgetoJapan marks the first of many in the "Local Help" category. As we build a small network of trusted guides we encourage anyone who has had a positive experiences with other services to contact us. We hope to have an independent contact point for each region to help our subscribers through the local process.

We are also considering adding a "Foreigner to Foreigner" sales section to the service to help foreigners who are intending to sell their property. We believe this will help the reduce some of the friction that can sometimes be associated with buying a property overseas. For a starting example please see this listing from a user that has a home for sale: For sale in Nara Prefecture.

You may have also noticed a few small changes on the site. We've replaced the general "Search" button with separate Buy and Rent buttons to limit confusion with the newly added rental property category. We've also made a few changes to make things clearer and easier to read, particularly the map.

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