A TikTok star makes thousands of dollars a month buying abandoned Japanese houses and renovating them into beautiful short-term rentals in tourist locations.
Anton Wormann, 32, originally from Sweden, moved to Japan in October 2018 and soon learned of the millions of abandoned homes across the country.
The first ‘akiya’ he found belonged to his neighbor in Sangenjaya, Tokyo. It was nearly 100 years old and had been abandoned for a decade.
Wormann, who also works as a model, bought this property for around eight million yen (£40,000), but there are ‘akiyas’ selling for as little as £7,000 elsewhere.
He spent 15 months renovating the three-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bathroom house, which now costs £1,261 to rent for a minimum of three nights on Airbnb.
Anton Wormann, 32, originally from Sweden, moved to Japan in October 2018.
And the 86-year-old property is normally booked up, meaning it generates around £11,000 for Wormann each month.
The renovation of ‘akiyas’ has recently gained momentum on TikTok, with dozens of creators from outside Japan boasting about the reasonable prices of the properties.
There are believed to be around nine million abandoned homes nationwide, largely due to Japan’s falling population and rapidly declining birth rate.
This figure fell to a historic low of 1.2 births per woman in 2023.
This, added to the aging of the population, which represents 30% of the country, had caused a kind of demographic crisis in Japan.
Death rates now exceed birth rates and, unusually, there is more housing than is needed for a declining population.
Mr. Wormann said CNBC He had read articles about ‘akiyas’ and was ‘fascinated’ by the phenomenon.
One of Anton Wormann’s seven renovated abandoned houses in Japan before and after
The houses have high-level finishes, with a Scandinavian interior style mixed with Japanese.
He said: “I never really understood how big the problem was, and also for me, how big the opportunity was until I moved here, learned Japanese and integrated into society.”
“Making something beautiful takes time… and it becomes something that no one else can replicate,” he said.
“I’d like to create something really good that you’re really proud of; it just makes me really happy.”
However, the reality may not be as positive as TikTok seems.
Although people like Wormann, who own several properties and rent out the renovated houses to tourists, can make money, there is still very little demand from locals.
After completing his first renovation, Wormann took up fixing up abandoned Japanese houses and now owns eight properties in Japan.
Pictured: Anton Wormann inside one of his eight Japanese properties, seven of which were ‘akiyas’
Japanese natives are less likely to buy a cheap, older house than a newly built one.
Wormann said he was “intimidated” by his first project in Sangenjaya, which is just a four-minute train ride from the famous Shibuya crossing.
“I was definitely intimidated… and I’ve only seen it from the outside, so I could only have imagined what it would look like from the inside,” he added.
“I expected it to be clean, empty (and) pretty small, but that wasn’t the case.”
After completing his first renovation, Wormann took up fixing up abandoned Japanese houses and now owns eight properties in Japan.
Seven of them were once abandoned.