A few operators I know have started asking the same question lately: “If I wanted to sell this whole thing — not just the apartment, but the business — what would the buyer actually be getting?” It’s a more complicated question than it sounds, because a short-term rental business in Japan is really a bundle of separate things — a lease or deed, a government registration, an OTA account, some furniture — and not all of them move together when money changes hands.
Everyone talks about entry: how to find the property, how to finance it, how to get the yield numbers right. In our experience, far less gets said about the exit, and that’s a problem, because in Japan the tax bill on selling a short-term rental can swing by more than 19 percentage points depending on a single number — how many years you’ve owned it.
I’ve been through this calculation for our own properties and for owners who ask us to help them think through timing a sale. The short version: the exit is not a footnote to your investment plan, it’s a variable you should be modeling from day one.