July 25, 2026
How to Extract Japanese Real Estate Data from Suumo and Beyond
Japan's property market publishes more listing data than almost any other, spread across portals that each cover a different slice — rentals, resale condos, abandoned rural homes, court foreclosures. This guide covers how to export listings in bulk from each, starting with Suumo search URLs.
Understanding Suumo search URLs
Suumo is Japan's largest property portal, and the practical entry point to it is the search URL. When you filter a search in the Suumo interface — prefecture, ward, station line, rent band, layout, building age — the result is encoded in the URL. That URL is the query, and it is the thing worth understanding before you export anything.
A few conventions matter:
- Property type lives in the path, not a parameter. Suumo splits rentals (
chintai), resale condos (ms/chuko), new condos (ms/shinchiku), houses (ikkodate), and land (tochi) into separate sections with different result templates. A URL from one section will not return results from another. - Location is hierarchical. Prefecture, city/ward, and station line are separate filters, and a station-line search returns a different result set than a geographic one covering nominally the same area.
- Layout codes are fixed vocabulary.
1K,1DK,1LDK,2LDKand so on are the standard Japanese layout notation — rooms plus living/dining/kitchen — and Suumo filters on them exactly.
The Suumo export takes one of these search URLs plus a mode (rental, used or new condo, used or new house, or land) and returns the matching listings as structured records: price or rent, layout, floor area, address, station access, and building age.
The workflow that works well: build the search in Suumo's own interface until the result set is what you want, copy the URL, and hand it over. You are not reconstructing Suumo's filter logic — you are reusing it.
Resale condos and houses from LIFULL HOMES
Suumo is the largest portal but not the only one, and listings are not fully duplicated across portals. The LIFULL HOMES export covers homes.co.jp for-sale inventory: resale condos (中古マンション), new condos, detached homes, and land.
It returns price in both JPY and USD, floor area, layout, management fees, station access, zoning, photos, and broker information. Management fees are the field to note — for a Japanese condo, the monthly management and repair-reserve charges materially change the carrying cost, and they are frequently missing from summary listings.
Running both Suumo and HOMES over the same geography and deduplicating on address is the standard approach to anything resembling full market coverage.
Akiya: Japan's abandoned-home banks
Japan has millions of vacant homes, and municipalities run akiya banks (空き家バンク) to list them. The listings are scattered across individual municipal sites in inconsistent formats, which is why the national aggregator on athome.jp is useful.
The akiya export covers all 47 prefectures through that aggregator, with bilingual addresses, live USD prices, a filter for gift properties listed at ¥0, and links back to the source municipality. The bilingual addressing and the source links are what make it workable for buyers outside Japan, where the blocker is usually not price but knowing which municipal office to contact.
Court foreclosure auctions
Below the retail portals sits the court auction system. The Japan court auction export pulls foreclosure listings from BIT, the courts' property auction system.
Court auction properties are sold through a bidding process with published minimum bids and inspection reports, and they price differently from retail listings. For anyone modelling Japanese property yields, court auction data is the floor that retail listings sit above.
Where to get the surrounding context
Property data alone rarely answers a property question. Three other Japanese sources fill in around it:
- e-Stat — the official statistics portal, including census and household data by municipality, which is what population-decline analysis actually runs on.
- gBizINFO — the government company database, for looking up the corporate entities behind commercial listings and brokerages.
- Japan rail timetables — station access drives Japanese property pricing more than almost any other variable, and timetable data turns "near a station" into actual journey times.
Portal coverage at a glance
| Source | Inventory | Search by | Notable fields |
|---|---|---|---|
| Suumo | Rentals, condos, houses, land | Suumo search URL | Rent/price, layout, area, station access, building age |
| LIFULL HOMES | For-sale condos, houses, land | Search URL | JPY + USD price, management fees, zoning, broker |
| athome akiya bank | Vacant homes, all 47 prefectures | Prefecture | Bilingual address, ¥0 gift filter, source municipality |
| BIT court auctions | Foreclosure properties | Court/region | Minimum bid, auction schedule |
What this costs against a real estate data API
Japanese property data vendors sell market-data subscriptions priced for brokerages — annual contracts sized to a business that transacts continuously. That fits a brokerage and fits almost nothing else.
These exports price per listing retrieved. A one-off yield study across three Tokyo wards costs what those listings cost. An akiya search across all 47 prefectures runs once. Nothing renews.
The honest limitation: portal listings are marketing data, not transaction records. They tell you asking prices, not sale prices. For actual transaction data, Japan's land ministry publishes its own aggregated transaction statistics, and court auction results give real clearing prices at the foreclosure end.
Which export do I need?
- Rental yield modelling — Suumo rentals for income, HOMES for-sale for acquisition cost.
- Buying from overseas — akiya bank for inventory, with the source-municipality links as the contact path.
- Distressed and below-market — BIT court auctions.
- Market-wide coverage — Suumo plus HOMES, deduplicated on address.
- Depopulation and demand analysis — e-Stat municipality statistics alongside listing volume.
For property data in other markets, see Building Permit Data and Property Records. For the wider catalog, browse Which Web Scraper Do I Need?.