KAGI A mobiAI company
The thesis

Japan's real-estate problem is a software problem.

The world's third-largest property market still runs on hanko seals, fax machines and closed networks — while nine million homes sit empty and foreign capital can't easily get in. That gap between an analog, over-regulated industry and a wave of global demand is exactly where KAGI is built.

The pain — objective and sourced

Six structural failures in Japanese real estate.

Not opinions — measured, public, and cited. Each is a reason the market is stuck, and a reason software that respects the regulation can win.

Analog by default

Hanko, fax, floppy disks

Personal seals still dominate contracting (~83% in 2022, but eroding fast) and government and industry still run on fax; METI warns of a "2025 digital cliff" costing up to ¥12T a year. CNN, 2025
Digitised late & unevenly

Paper-era contracting

Online important-matters explanations (IT重説) arrived only in 2017–2021, and fully electronic documents in 2022 — recent, and still unevenly adopted across a fragmented industry. CloudSign
Broker distrust

Dual-agency & listing lock-up

両手仲介 and 囲い込み — agents representing both sides and hiding listings to double their fee — are a well-documented, regulator-flagged trust problem. MRL Tokyo
Empty supply

9 million vacant homes

13.8% of all dwellings, double 1993; aging owners, 30%+ with unclear title, and a shrinking pool of contractors to maintain them. CNN / 総務省
Foreigners shut out

Rejected at the door

In a 2017 Ministry of Justice survey, 39.8% of foreigners had been refused housing for being foreign and ~40% for lacking a Japanese guarantor — on top of language, tax and financing walls. MOJ survey
Compliance maze

A minefield from abroad

Minpaku's 180-night cap, guest registry (名簿), lodging tax and municipal filing — tightening every year (Osaka suspended new licences in 2026) — are unmanageable for a remote foreign owner.
Our answer — architecture

Build the software around the regulation, not despite it.

Most proptech tries to route around Japan's rules and stalls. We treat the regulation as the core and make it programmable — six principles the platform is built on.

01

Compliance-as-code

The 180-night cap, guest registry, lodging tax and reporting live as rules and effective-dated tables — computed, not checked by hand.

02

Portable core + adapters

The regulation changes constantly; the core never does. Each rule, channel and payment provider is a swappable adapter behind a stable interface.

03

An analog bridge

Fax, hanko, e-contracts, IT重説 and closed networks are wrapped behind clean adapters — so the messy analog world meets a modern API, not the other way round.

04

Idempotent + audited

Over unreliable legacy systems, every action happens exactly once and every sensitive access is logged to an immutable trail. Safe by construction.

05

PII treated as sacred

Passports and the guest registry are field-level encrypted, access-audited and retention-governed under APPI — by design, not as an afterthought.

06

Transparent settlement

Every yen is decomposed and reconciled, visible to the owner in their language and currency — the direct answer to a market trained to distrust its middlemen.

Our answer — business

The asset-light layer between empty supply and foreign demand.

Full-stack, asset-light

Acquire → operate → report for the owner, while owning no buildings ourselves. Software makes each additional unit nearly free to run.

Compliance is the moat

Every regulatory turn raises the barrier for amateur hosts and deepens the switching cost for owners already on the platform.

Trust is the wedge

Transparent settlement and a hard no-両手 rule are a real differentiator in a market taught to distrust brokers.

We absorb the friction. The owner just earns.

Guarantor, language, tax, remote operations, cross-border settlement — handled.

Talk to us
Sources

The pain points above are public and cited.

KAGI

KAGI is the Japan real-estate initiative of mobiAI, Inc. — an operating company applying AI across mobility, logistics, development, cosmetics and real estate.

A mobiAI company

Company

mobiAI, Inc.(mobiAI株式会社)
〒162-0065
東京都新宿区住吉町1-19 ノグチビル2階
Tel 03-6820-5321
info@mobiai.co.jp

Partners

Ciel MobilitySouth Korea · DRT platform
JasnitaIndonesia · telecom