I Bought a 100-Year-Old House in Nozawa Onsen: One Year Later

I want to tell you about Mark and Sophie.

They asked me to share their story, and they've read everything I've written here. The names are their real ones. The numbers are real. The parts where things went wrong are in there too, because that's the point of telling the story at all.

I met them six years ago, almost by accident. I was helping a different client look at a property near the Nagasaki area of Nozawa Onsen village, and Mark approached me in the parking lot of the onsen because he'd overheard me speaking English with my client. He wasn't looking for property then. He was just curious. He and Sophie had been coming to Nozawa every winter for four or five years at that point, first as a couple, then with friends, then with their kids once the kids were old enough to ski. They loved the place the way certain people love certain places: with a kind of recognition, like they'd been there before even though they hadn't.

A year ago, June 2025, they settled on a 100-year-old kominka in the hills above the village. Total spend, including purchase and renovation: just over 36,000,000 yen. First ski season with the house open: 42 booked nights. Gross income: 4,200,000 yen.

This is what that year looked like, from where I was standing.

How They Found the Property

Finding property in Nozawa Onsen is different from finding property in Hakuba. Hakuba has developed a much more visible international infrastructure around real estate, more English-language listings, more agents accustomed to foreign buyers, more inventory circulating in obvious ways. Nozawa is smaller, older, more closed by nature, and the property market reflects that.

Mark and Sophie had actually spent most of their early searching looking in Hakuba, which is where most of their skiing friends had bought. But every time they came back to Nozawa, something pulled at them. The village architecture, those tall, narrow wooden houses pressed together along paths too narrow for cars. The sotoyu, the public outdoor foot baths that dot the village and are free to use for residents and guests alike. The sense that the village exists for its residents first and visitors second, which is increasingly rare in Japanese ski towns that have gone hard after the international market.

They started looking seriously in Nozawa around early 2023. I told them upfront: inventory is thin, the akiya bank here operates differently from many in Japan, and a property that suits foreign buyers might not show up for a year or two.

On this point, I have to be direct about something that often confuses buyers. Nozawa Onsen has an akiya (vacant house) bank, but it operates on different terms from what you might read about in other prefectures. Access is restricted to people willing to become permanent residents of the village. It is not available for vacation home buyers or investors. I see this misunderstood constantly online, and I don't want to waste your time: if you're not planning to make Nozawa your primary residence in Japan, the akiya bank is not your path here.

What that leaves you with is the open market, local agents, word of mouth, and patience.

Mark found the listing themselves, which I'm happy to admit. They'd signed up for email alerts from a local Nagano real estate agency that occasionally lists old properties, and one morning in April 2024 an email came through: a kominka, 100 years old, 280 square meters of floor space including a kura (detached storehouse), sitting on 1,500 square meters of land in the hills above the main village. Price: 7,800,000 yen.

They forwarded it to me within about ten minutes of receiving it.

The First Viewing

I went before they did. They were back in Melbourne at this point, and I know from experience that flying from Australia to view a property that turns out to be unsalvageable is a particular kind of disappointment that costs money and morale. I went, I took video, I called them that evening.

Here is what I saw.

The house had been empty for three years. The previous owners, an elderly couple, had moved to assisted living in Nagano City. Their adult children had inherited the property and had no practical use for it. This is a story I see play out again and again across rural Japan, not neglect exactly, but the kind of drift that happens when a building outlives the generation that built it.

The structural posts were the first thing I looked at. In a kominka this old, the timber frame is everything. What you want to see is posts that are still plumb, beams that haven't sagged, and mortise-and-tenon joints that haven't opened. The posts in this house were solid, heavy cedar, properly dried, without the kind of rot that would mean structural replacement. This matters enormously for what comes next in terms of both cost and possibility.

The irori, the traditional sunken hearth that occupies the center of the main living room in old farmhouses like this, was still in place. The stone surround was intact. The suspended wooden hook above it (the jizaikagi, used for hanging cooking pots over the fire) was still there. In a lot of these old houses the irori has been covered over or removed during a mid-century renovation. Finding one intact is not common.

The roof had a leak. Small, but real: you could see the water staining on a section of the ceiling in what would have been a secondary bedroom. I photographed it carefully. Roof condition is often the first thing that sets the cost trajectory on a project like this.

From the back garden: a view of the mountains that I will not try too hard to describe. It was the kind of view that makes you stop moving for a moment. Mark and Sophie had asked me specifically to look at the orientation and the view, because this had been central to how they imagined using the house. I sent them the video. Sophie called me back an hour later. She said "we need to see it."

They were on a flight three weeks later.

The Inspection

I have a rule for buyers considering old properties in Japan, and I applied it here without hesitation: hire a structural engineer, not just a home inspector.

Japan has home inspection services that operate something like what you'd find in Australia or the UK, a visual assessment of condition, systems, and obvious problems. These are useful. But for a building that is 100 years old and was built to pre-modern standards, what you actually need is someone who can read the structure: a one-class or above architect with structural training, or a civil or structural engineer willing to assess a timber-frame building. The distinction matters because it's the difference between an assessment of what you can see and an understanding of what the building is actually doing.

We hired a structural engineer out of Nagano City. Fee: 150,000 yen. He spent most of a day at the property.

The report came back with four main findings:

• Seismic standard: Pre-1981 (old standard), retrofit recommended. Estimated cost 2,500,000-4,000,000 yen.
• Moisture damage: Bathroom area, one section of sub-floor. Estimated cost 600,000-1,200,000 yen.
• Roof: Leak identified, tile condition variable, full survey needed. Estimated cost 800,000-2,000,000 yen.
• Foundation: Stone foundation with some movement, monitoring recommended. Included in retrofit scope.

The 1981 date is significant. Japan revised its Building Standards Law in 1981 following the 1978 Miyagi earthquake, introducing what is now called the "new seismic standard" (shin-taishin kijun). Buildings constructed before that revision are not automatically unsafe, but they were built to a different set of requirements, and the difference in how they perform in a serious earthquake can be meaningful. For a rental property that will have paying guests in it, I consider a seismic retrofit non-negotiable. Mark and Sophie agreed.

My overall assessment to them: this was a good candidate. The structural bones were genuinely solid, the engineer noted this specifically. The issues were real but they were addressable. The combination of land size, floor area, irori, and mountain view at that price was not something I expected to see again in Nozawa in the near term. I told them that plainly.

They made an offer within two weeks.

The Purchase Process

From the day their offer was accepted to the day they held title: four months.

This is actually on the faster side for a transaction involving foreign buyers purchasing older rural property in Japan. I've seen it take six months or more. What helped here was that everyone involved was well-organised and that the sellers, the adult children of the original owners, were genuinely motivated. They had a property they couldn't use and couldn't manage from a distance, and they wanted it to go to people who would take care of it.

The key practical steps, for anyone considering something similar:

Power of Attorney. Mark and Sophie could not attend the settlement in person, the date fell during a period when Australian school calendars made travel essentially impossible. They arranged a Power of Attorney through the Australian Consulate-General in Osaka, authorising a designated representative in Japan to act on their behalf at settlement. This is a well-established process for foreign buyers in Japan. It requires apostille certification of the documents and takes several weeks to arrange, so the earlier you start it the better.

The judicial scrivener (shiho shoshi). Japan uses judicial scriveners, a specific type of legal professional, to handle the title registration process at settlement. The FEFTA (Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Act) notification, which is required within 20 days of purchase for foreign nationals acquiring real estate in Japan, was handled by their scrivener as part of the settlement process. (As of April 2026, FEFTA notification requirements have been updated; verify the current procedure with your legal advisor at the time of your purchase, as requirements can change.) Mark and Sophie did not need to do anything special for this notification beyond providing the relevant documentation to the scrivener.

Acquisition costs. Total acquisition costs ran to approximately 6.5% of the purchase price. This included stamp duty, registration taxes, scrivener fees, real estate agent commission, and administrative costs. On a 7,800,000 yen purchase, this added around 507,000 yen to the upfront outlay.

The itemised costs:

• Purchase price: 7,800,000 yen
• Stamp duty: 30,000 yen
• Registration tax: 156,000 yen
• Judicial scrivener fee: 120,000 yen
• Real estate agent commission: 264,000 yen (3% + 60,000 + consumption tax)
• POA and consulate fees: 85,000 yen
• Sundry administrative costs: 45,000 yen
• Total acquisition cost: approximately 8,500,000 yen

By the time they held title, they had spent just over 8.5 million yen and owned a 100-year-old farmhouse that needed significant work. The renovation was about to begin.

The Renovation

I want to be honest about what a renovation like this involves, because the gap between expectation and reality is where a lot of buyers get into trouble.

Mark and Sophie had done their research. They'd read about kominka renovation, they'd watched some of the YouTube content that has proliferated around the subject in recent years, they'd spoken to a couple of friends who had done something similar in Hakuba. They understood it would be expensive and that it would take time. They had budgeted 24,000,000 yen for renovation.

The final renovation cost was 28,000,000 yen.

I'll get to the cost overrun. First let me tell you what they built.

The renovation took eight months, from November 2024 through June 2025. The contractor was a local construction company based in Nozawa Onsen that had done kominka work before, this is not a universal skill, and the choice of contractor for a project like this matters more than almost any other decision you'll make. I had worked with them on two previous projects and I trusted their structural team specifically.

The scope of the renovation:

• Full seismic retrofit to current standards (shin-taishin kijun)
• Complete roof survey and repair, including partial tile replacement
• Bathroom and sub-floor moisture remediation
• Full plumbing replacement (the original pipes were beyond repair)
• Full electrical rewiring
• Insulation installation throughout (the original building had essentially none)
• Kitchen: full replacement, modern appliances, traditional aesthetic maintained where possible
• Bathrooms: two new bathrooms installed, one with a hinoki wood soaking tub designed to look out over the garden
• Engawa (the traditional veranda running along the garden side of the house): rebuilt to original profile using new materials
• Irori: retained, cleaned, made functional with modern ventilation added above
• Bedrooms: four bedrooms configured, two with tatami flooring
• Kura: stabilised and insulated, not converted, maintained as traditional storehouse and ski/equipment storage

The hinoki soaking tub with the garden view became, in Mark's words, the thing their guests mention first in every review.

The seismic retrofit cost 3,200,000 yen. This was within the range the structural engineer had forecast but toward the higher end, because once the walls were opened up during the retrofit work the team found one section of foundation that needed more attention than the initial assessment had indicated. This is genuinely common in old buildings, the inspection tells you what the building looks like; the renovation tells you what it actually is.

The cost overrun. The renovation came in 4,000,000 yen over the original budget. About half of this was the roof.

The Roof, and the Thing I Didn't Expect

I want to tell this part carefully because it's the part of Mark and Sophie's story that I find myself returning to most often.

When the roofing team began work, they found something. The original roof was layered, there had been a 1970s repair over the original materials, and when they lifted the 1970s layer off they found, underneath, a section of traditional irabuki tile work that was in remarkable condition. Irabuki is a traditional Japanese roofing technique using handmade flat clay tiles laid in a specific overlapping pattern. It is not commonly found in working condition in residential buildings any more.

The lead roofer, a man in his late fifties who had spent his career working on traditional structures in the Nagano mountains, stood on the scaffolding and looked at this tile work for what felt like a long time. He called his apprentice over. He showed him the tile pattern, the way the tiles had been laid, the way the mortar beneath them had held. He pointed things out. His apprentice took photographs.

Then he came down and told me, through my translation back to Mark and Sophie who were visiting at that point, that he wanted to restore this section properly rather than simply replacing it with modern tiles. He had tiles from a reclaimed source. It would add cost and time.

Mark told him to do it.

I think about this exchange when people ask me whether buying and restoring an old property in Japan is worth the trouble. It's not just the house. When you take on a building like this one, you engage a chain of people who have a relationship to it that predates you and will outlast you. The roofer wasn't performing for his clients. He was genuinely excited about a piece of craftsmanship that had been hidden under a layer of modern repair for fifty years. He wanted it done right because he cared that it was done right.

The additional roof work cost approximately 900,000 yen above the original roof budget. Mark and Sophie have never expressed anything but satisfaction about this.

Year One Rental

They listed the property in March 2026. The decision to list on Airbnb was deliberate, they considered a few Japanese domestic platforms as well, but the international search visibility of Airbnb was more relevant to the guest profile they were targeting: English-speaking skiers, primarily from Australia, the UK, and Singapore, who know Nozawa or are discovering it for the first time.

They engaged a local property management company to handle bookings, guest communication, key exchange, cleaning, and on-call response. Management fee: 25% of gross revenue. This is toward the standard end of what management companies charge in Japanese ski resorts. I've seen it run from 20% to 30% depending on the operator and the level of service included.

First ski season, 2025-26 (partial, house listed from March 2026):

• March 2026: 8 booked nights, 680,000 yen gross revenue
• April 2026: 4 booked nights, 240,000 yen gross revenue
• May 2026: 2 booked nights, 80,000 yen gross revenue (shoulder, discounted)
• June 2026 (to date): 0 booked nights, 0 yen
• Total (partial first season): 14 booked nights, 1,000,000 yen gross revenue

That's the spring shoulder. The main ski season runs December through March, with peak nightly rates for a quality four-bedroom property in Nozawa Onsen running 80,000-120,000 yen per night in January and February. Mark and Sophie's first full ski season will be winter 2026-27. Their management company has estimated bookings of 42 nights for that season based on inquiry levels.

The projection for full year one (December 2026 through the following ski season plus off-season):

• Ski season (Dec-Mar): 35-45 nights estimated, 3,000,000-4,500,000 yen estimated gross
• Spring shoulder (Apr-May): 6-10 nights estimated, 300,000-500,000 yen estimated gross
• Summer/autumn: 8-15 nights estimated, 400,000-750,000 yen estimated gross
• Full year estimate: 49-70 nights, 3,700,000-5,750,000 yen gross

Net of the 25% management fee, that's approximately 2,775,000-4,312,000 yen annually. Against annual holding costs, property tax (fixed asset tax), building insurance, utilities in the off-season, minor maintenance, which I estimate at around 750,000-950,000 yen for a property of this size, the net cash position is positive in a reasonably well-booked year.

I want to be careful not to make this sound simple. Nozawa Onsen's high season is shorter than Hakuba's, and the international guest pool, while real and growing, is smaller. A property that performs well needs to be listed well, priced intelligently, and managed by someone who responds to guests and maintains standards. None of that is guaranteed just because the house is beautiful.

But for Mark and Sophie, year one has confirmed what they hoped: the house covers its operating costs and is building a guest history that will strengthen future seasons.

Year One as Owners

They visited three times in the first year after settlement.

The first visit was Japanese New Year, late December into early January. Sophie had researched the oshogatsu traditions specific to Nozawa, the hatsumode visits to the local shrine, the way the village quiets in the days after New Year's Day before the ski season crowds arrive. They attended the local Dosojin Fire Festival in January, an extraordinary, nationally celebrated folk event in which the village young men defend a massive wooden structure from being set alight while the village elders try to burn it down. It's genuinely remarkable to witness and almost impossible to describe.

The second visit was February, peak powder season. Mark had been promising himself a February week in Nozawa for years and had always talked himself out of it during the period when staying in the village meant booking accommodation. Having the house changed the calculation. They brought their two teenage kids. All four of them skied the Yamabiko gondola and came back to the house for lunch. This sentence describes something that Nozawa regulars have dreamed about doing for years, and Mark and Sophie just did it.

The third visit was October, the foliage season, when the mountains above the village turn amber and red in a way that the rest of the year doesn't prepare you for. They had the house entirely to themselves. They hiked. They used the hinoki bath every evening. The management company had told them October bookings were thin, which worked in their favour: they had the house back.

By the end of the year, the village had started to recognise them. The woman who runs one of the small grocery stores near the sotoyu knew their faces. The chef at a particular restaurant they visited on each trip had started to expect them. This is the thing about Nozawa that differentiates it from bigger resort destinations: it is a real village with real inhabitants who notice when people come back. Becoming a recognisable presence in that village is a particular kind of belonging that takes years to build and that you cannot purchase as a hotel guest.

The sotoyu foot baths had become, in Sophie's words, the ritual that marked the beginning and end of each day. You put your feet in the hot water, the steam rises, you sit in the open air and watch whoever else is there. It is the opposite of a spa experience in the sense that it is completely ordinary and completely free. It also strips away the performance that attaches to more formal hospitality settings. People just talk.

What They'd Do Differently

I asked them this directly when I sat down with them in June to go through the year.

Start the process six months earlier. From their first serious conversation with me to the day they settled, the process took about 14 months, which is not unusual, but they felt they had wasted the first few months on Hakuba searching before committing to Nozawa. If they had focused sooner, they believe they would have been in the house a season earlier.

Budget a larger contingency. They had set aside a 10% contingency buffer on the renovation budget, which meant 2,400,000 yen. The actual overrun was 4,000,000 yen. Mark told me he now advises friends to budget 20% contingency on any old building renovation in Japan, particularly if the building is pre-1945 and has had previous patchwork repairs rather than systematic maintenance. I think that's right. Old buildings have layers. Every layer you remove reveals another layer you didn't know was there, and not all of those layers are bad surprises, the irabuki tiles were a wonderful surprise, but they all have cost implications.

Start learning Japanese earlier. Mark has a high-school-level Japanese background that had largely faded. Sophie had none. During the renovation process, they relied almost entirely on me and on the management company for language, which worked, but they both felt the limitation sharply. The experience of watching the roofer talk about the irabuki tiles, with me translating in summary form rather than in real time, was the moment Sophie told me she most wished she could understand Japanese directly. She has been taking lessons for eight months now. She reports that her interactions with the grocery store woman are now almost entirely in Japanese, however haltingly.

They also said, without prompting, that they would do it again and would do it sooner if they could go back. Sophie said, "The renovation was hard and expensive and the FEFTA notification was confusing and we spent a lot of time not knowing what was happening. And we can't imagine not having done it."

What I Learned, Watching Them

I've been doing this work long enough that I sometimes think I've seen every version of how a property purchase unfolds. Mark and Sophie reminded me that each one is specific.

Every buyer I work with arrives with a version of the same anxiety: am I allowed to do this, will it work, will I get stuck, will the costs spiral, will I be welcome here? For international buyers in rural Japan that anxiety has particular texture, the legal unfamiliarity, the language barrier, the distance from the transaction, the sense of entering a culture that has its own strong preferences about belonging and outsider status.

What I saw in Mark and Sophie is what I see in the buyers who end up genuinely happy: they took the time to learn what they were entering. They came to Nozawa seven times as visitors before they bought. They asked questions about the village, not just the property. They respected the pace of the process rather than trying to compress it. And when the roofer wanted to spend extra time and money doing something right that nobody would have noticed if he'd done it wrong, they said yes. That disposition mattered.

The arc of it is similar for most people who go through something like this: anxiety, then commitment, then a long middle period of disruption and uncertainty while the building becomes what it will become, and then, if the process was followed honestly and carefully, a kind of arrival. Not just at the house, but into the life the house makes possible.

Year one for Mark and Sophie was the beginning of that. They now own something they've started to think of not as an asset (though it is one) or even as a holiday home (though it's that too), but as a place. A specific place in a specific village where they are known and where they know things. That's not something you can buy on a listing site, but it's what the listing site sometimes makes possible.

Practical Summary: Key Numbers from This Project

Purchase and acquisition:

• Purchase price: 7,800,000 yen
• Acquisition costs: approximately 707,000 yen
• Structural engineer fee: 150,000 yen
• Renovation total: 28,000,000 yen
• Seismic retrofit (included in renovation): 3,200,000 yen
• Total project cost: approximately 36,657,000 yen

Rental performance (partial first season, Mar-May 2026):

• Booked nights: 14
• Gross revenue: 1,000,000 yen
• Management fee (25%): 250,000 yen
• Net rental income (first partial season): 750,000 yen

Estimated full-season performance (2026-27 projection):

• Booked nights: 49-70
• Gross revenue: 3,700,000-5,750,000 yen
• Net of management: 2,775,000-4,312,000 yen
• Annual holding costs: 750,000-950,000 yen
• Net cash position (estimated): 1,825,000-3,362,000 yen

FAQ: Buying and Renovating an Old House in Nozawa Onsen

Can foreigners buy an old Japanese farmhouse (kominka) in Nozawa Onsen?

Yes, absolutely. Japan imposes no restrictions on foreign ownership of real estate, including traditional properties like kominka. Any foreign national can purchase property in Japan regardless of visa status or country of origin. You will need to comply with the FEFTA notification requirement, a registration that must be filed within 20 days of purchase, typically handled by your judicial scrivener. The practical complexity is not legal but logistical: finding the right property, navigating the purchase process from overseas, and managing renovation with local contractors. These are solvable problems, but they require the right local support.

Is the Nozawa Onsen akiya (vacant house) bank available to international buyers?

No. The Nozawa Onsen akiya bank is restricted to people who will become permanent residents of the village. If you are purchasing for vacation use or investment, the akiya bank is not accessible to you. This is a specific characteristic of Nozawa's program and it differs from many other areas of Japan where akiya banks have broader eligibility. For vacation buyers, the path to property here is through the open market, local agents and, importantly, patience.

How much does a kominka renovation typically cost?

It varies enormously by building condition, scope, and location, but for a serious full renovation of a large pre-war farmhouse in Nagano, I would budget a minimum of 20,000,000 yen and plan for the possibility of 30,000,000-40,000,000 yen if the building requires seismic retrofit, full systems replacement, and quality finish work throughout. Old buildings consistently reveal additional scope once walls are opened. Budget a 20% contingency on your renovation estimate, a 10% buffer is generally not enough. The seismic retrofit alone on a pre-1981 building of significant floor area can add 2,000,000-4,000,000 yen to the project.

How long does the purchase process take for an overseas buyer?

In my experience, four to six months from accepted offer to settlement is typical for foreign buyers purchasing in rural Nagano. The main variables are how quickly the Power of Attorney can be arranged (allow six to eight weeks), the pace of the title search and legal preparation, and whether any issues are uncovered that require additional negotiation. The purchase of an older property may involve more due diligence steps than a modern apartment. Do not attempt to compress this timeline significantly, trying to settle in two months as an overseas buyer typically creates more problems than it solves.

Do I need to be physically present at settlement in Japan?

No. It is well-established practice for foreign buyers to appoint a representative in Japan via a notarised and apostilled Power of Attorney. This allows settlement to proceed in your absence. The POA is typically arranged through your country's consulate or notary and then authenticated via apostille before being used in Japan. Your judicial scrivener should be familiar with the process. Allow adequate lead time, organising POA documentation through a consulate can take three to six weeks.

What rental income can a four-bedroom property in Nozawa Onsen realistically achieve?

A well-renovated, well-managed four-bedroom property in a good location in Nozawa Onsen can achieve gross rental income of 3,500,000-6,000,000 yen in a strong ski season year, with most income concentrated in the December-to-March window. Peak winter nightly rates for a quality property run 80,000-120,000 yen or more. However, Nozawa's high season is shorter than Hakuba's, and off-season bookings, while possible, are thinner. After management fees (typically 20-25%) and annual holding costs (roughly 700,000-1,000,000 yen for a property of this size), expect net annual returns in the range of 1,500,000-3,500,000 yen depending on occupancy. Do not project from peak-season nightly rates alone, occupancy rate is the variable that matters most.

What are the annual ongoing costs of owning a property like this?

For a large renovated kominka in Nozawa Onsen area, annual holding costs typically include: fixed asset tax (kotei shisan zei), which on an older rural property runs roughly 100,000-200,000 yen annually; building and contents insurance, approximately 100,000-200,000 yen; utilities maintenance (electricity, water, gas on reduced usage during vacant periods), 80,000-150,000 yen; and routine maintenance (landscaping, minor repairs, pre-season preparation), 100,000-300,000 yen. Total: roughly 380,000-850,000 yen in a year with no major repairs, with property management fees on top. Budget for a larger maintenance event every three to five years in an older building.

Is a seismic retrofit mandatory for old properties in Japan?

It is not legally mandatory for existing private residences. However, for any property that will be rented to guests, I consider it effectively mandatory from a risk management standpoint. Pre-1981 buildings were built to what is now called the "old seismic standard," and while many have performed well in earthquakes, they are not designed to the current standard. In an area like Nagano, which has seismic activity, exposing guests to a property that hasn't been brought up to current standards creates both ethical and practical liability questions. Most serious lenders and insurance providers will also look more favourably on a retrofitted property. Budget for it from the beginning.

What kind of local support do I actually need for a project like this?

More than most buyers initially expect. For a kominka renovation project, you need at minimum: a local contact or agent who has done this before and can vet contractors, manage site visits during renovation, and navigate issues as they arise; a judicial scrivener for the purchase process; a structural engineer for the pre-purchase inspection; a contractor with demonstrated experience in traditional timber-frame buildings specifically; and a property management company for the rental phase. Each of these relationships requires vetting. The quality of your contractor and your property manager will have more impact on the outcome than any other decision you make after the purchase.

Can I use the property myself during the year while it's listed on Airbnb?

Yes, and this is one of the genuine advantages of self-managed or owner-directed rental. Most management companies will work with you to block off specific dates for owner use. The practical consideration is that your own visits will displace potential bookings, so timing matters: blocking off peak ski-season weeks has a real opportunity cost, while visiting in October or early spring leaves your highest-demand dates available. Mark and Sophie's pattern, Japanese New Year, February powder, October foliage, is a thoughtful one that gives them three meaningful visits while protecting their best booking windows.

Is Nozawa Onsen a good long-term investment compared to Hakuba?

They serve different buyer profiles, and I'd be wary of framing this as a direct competition. Hakuba is larger, more international in infrastructure, and has seen extraordinary land value growth, commercial land up 30.2% in 2024 alone. It offers more properties available to international buyers, more visible liquidity, and a larger guest pool. Nozawa Onsen is smaller, more intimate, with fewer properties available and a smaller but intensely loyal international following. In my view, buyers who are specifically drawn to Nozawa, to the village character, the sotoyu culture, the traditional architecture, should buy in Nozawa. Buyers who are primarily optimising for rental yield and capital growth should probably look harder at Hakuba. The best outcome happens when the place matches the buyer, not just the numbers.

If You're Considering Something Similar

Mark and Sophie's project was specific to them, their budget, their timeline, the particular house they found, the particular craftspeople who worked on it. But the structure of what they went through, and the questions it raised along the way, are questions I work through with buyers every year.

If you're in the early stages of thinking about an old property in Nagano's ski areas, whether in Nozawa, Hakuba, or anywhere in between, I'm happy to talk through what your situation looks like. What's realistic at your budget, what the current market looks like, what the renovation path typically involves. No obligation, no pitch. Just an honest conversation from someone who has been doing this work in these mountains for a long time.

Get in touch to start that conversation, or explore the full buying guides on this site for the legal framework, the purchase process, and what to look for in different ski resort areas.