WHEN Jaya Thursfield found a house he wanted to buy in Japan a few years ago, friends and family told him to forget it. The place wasn’t worth the trouble, they said. After all, it stood in a forest of shoulder-high weeds after being abandoned about seven years earlier – one of the millions of vacant houses known as akiya, Japanese for “empty house” – throughout the country.
BALLOT for an HDB flat. Get married and move in. Fulfil the minimum occupation period. Sell the flat and upgrade to a condominium. This is the typical real estate journey of many Singaporean couples.