Yuki no Kuni indexes property listings from three categories of public source: municipal akiya banks, prefectural aggregators, and the commercial portals. This page lists every active source, our refresh cadence for each, and what we do when a source disappears.
How indexing works
Once a week, a scraper runs against each enabled source. It fetches the source's listing pages, extracts price, location, area, and contact information, and writes the raw payload to our database. A normalizer then converts era dates (Showa 55 → 1980), price strings (3万円 → 30,000), and addresses into our standard schema. A photo-fetcher pulls listing images and stores them on our servers (we never hot-link). Every step is reversible — if we discover a source has changed structure, we re-fetch from the beginning rather than guess.
The sources we track
Akiya banks — municipal
The primary source category. Each is a local government website publishing vacant homes. Refresh: weekly.
- Iiyama-shi (Nagano)
- Hakuba-mura (Nagano)
- Nozawa Onsen-mura (Nagano)
- Tomi-shi (Nagano)
- Saku-shi (Nagano)
- Niseko-cho (Hokkaido)
- Furano-shi (Hokkaido)
- Otofuke-cho (Hokkaido)
- Senboku-shi (Akita)
- Yuzawa-shi (Akita)
- Yokote-shi (Akita)
- Obanazawa-shi (Yamagata)
- Tendo-shi (Yamagata)
- Takayama-shi (Gifu)
- Hida-shi (Gifu)
- + 45 more, scrolled out for brevity
Aggregators
- LIFULL Home's akiya bank — national aggregator of municipal listings. Refresh: weekly.
- at-home akiya bank — commercial aggregator covering 600+ municipalities. Refresh: weekly.
Commercial portals
- SUUMO chukoikkodate (snow regions) — commercial listings, used for cross-referencing prices. Disabled by default per editorial priority; available to Insider subscribers.
When a source disappears
Municipal akiya bank pages have been known to vanish, change URL structure, or go offline for renovation. When this happens, we mark the affected listings "source unreachable" and email Insider subscribers within 48 hours. We retain the original payload so the listing remains visible — with a banner indicating the source is no longer reachable — and continue retrying weekly until it returns or we declare the source dead.
If you spot a listing where the source link 404s, write to us. We track these.
How to report an inaccuracy
If a listing's price, area, or status looks wrong, the fastest fix is to email us with the listing's plate number. We will compare against the source on the same day, and if the source itself was correct and we mis-translated, we correct it the same day. If the source itself is wrong, we mark the listing "source disputed" until the source is fixed.