Prohibition
An estate that prohibits rental closes off the income that could sustain its houses and its owners. The value stays locked away, and the houses keep ageing on the owners’ account.
Short-term rental consulting and operations · Japan’s resort estates
Japan’s resort estates, ready for their second era.
Sanka designs and runs minpaku operations inside private estates, resort communities and villa developments across Japan. Professional, profitable and lawful — protecting three parties at once: the owners who rent, the owners who do not, and the estate itself.
- When these communities were built
- 1960s–90s
- The ceiling we design around
- 180 nights
- Accountable to the estate
- One operator
The problem we exist to solve
Thousands of good houses, closed eleven months a year.
Between the 1960s and the early 1990s, developers created thousands of holiday communities in the mountainsides around the Fuji Five Lakes, Karuizawa, Hakone, Izu and Nasu. Companies bought villas for executive retreats. Families bought second homes they returned to every August. Estate management companies grew up around these communities, maintaining roads, running clubhouses, and holding the whole together.
Times have changed, as they do. Many of the founding owners are now in their seventies and eighties. Their children have built lives in Tokyo and Osaka and visit, when work allows, perhaps once a year. Houses that were once full of summer sit closed for eleven months — and a mountain house left closed suffers for it: frozen pipes in January, damp by June, wildlife in the ceiling by autumn.
None of this reflects on the estates themselves. The stock is often superb: detached houses in private, gated communities, at elevation, in the most beautiful parts of the country, within three hours of forty million people. The houses were built well and the communities were built with care. What they need is not replacement. What they need is a new way to be used, alongside the old one.
Short-term rental offers that new use. Japan’s Private Lodging Business Act — the minpaku law — made it possible in 2018 for a private home to welcome paying guests for up to 180 nights a year. For a resort estate the arithmetic is quietly transformative. A house that earns turns maintenance from a burden into an investment. An owner with rental income keeps the family property rather than letting it go. A house with guests in it is a house someone is heating, airing, inspecting and caring for.
And yet most estates take one of two paths. Both cost the community, and the second costs more than the first.
No structure
An estate that permits rental without structure gets the version every resident worries about: individual owners listing independently, each with their own standards, their own key arrangements, their own judgement about how many guests a house should hold. No one screens guests. No one answers the phone late at night when a group is still on the terrace. The residents who never wanted rentals bear the disturbance, the estate bears the reputation, and within a few years the general meeting withdraws permission for everyone — usually because of the conduct of a few.
The difficulty in both cases has the same root. Not the guests, and not the law. The absence of a single, accountable operator.
Sanka is that operator. We are a short-term rental management consulting and operations company, working with estates across Japan to build operations that are professional, profitable and lawful. The registered entity is 三華開発合同会社 (Sanka Kaihatsu G.K.), a Japanese limited liability company directed by Yuka du Plessis.
Who we work with
Four kinds of client, one shared interest.
Rental inside a private estate happens on the estate’s terms or it happens piecemeal. Everyone we work with has a stake in the first outcome.
01
Estate management companies and developers
The administrators of resort communities hold the keys to this entire question. We work with management companies that want a regulated operation, run by a single accountable party, that strengthens the estate’s finances and reputation. For a management company it is also a practical answer to a familiar challenge: keeping the community of active, engaged owners strong.
02
Owners’ associations
Communities weighing whether to permit minpaku at all. What an association needs is rarely enthusiasm. It is a framework: rules that protect the resident who bought the place for silence in 1985, a clear answer to who is responsible when something goes wrong, and evidence from elsewhere that this can be done without the horror stories. We provide the framework, and we stand behind it as the party the rules point at.
03
Individual property owners
Owners inside estates where we operate, who want their house run as a serious business without carrying any of the work. Some are the original families, funding the upkeep of a place they still love. Some are heirs deciding between selling and keeping. Some simply want the house to stop costing money.
04
Investors
Buyers acquiring resort property specifically for rental income. For them we handle the full arc from the day of purchase: licensing, preparation, launch and operation, with a revenue projection they can underwrite against before they sign.
What we do
Two practices that keep each other honest.
The consulting practice designs operations. The management practice runs them. Everything we recommend as consultants, we have already had to make work as operators — which keeps the advice honest in a way that pure advisory work never is.
Consulting
Questions that sound simple and are not.
Before the first guest arrives, an estate needs real answers to four of them.
Which properties are actually suitable?
Suitability is legal, physical and commercial at once. A house can be structurally perfect and fail on fire egress. It can pass every inspection and still be a poor rental because it sleeps eight but parks one car.
What should the estate’s own rules say?
National law is only the outer boundary. The rules that decide whether rental works in practice are the estate’s private regulations: who may operate, how guests are screened, where they park, when noise stops, how waste is separated, who a neighbour calls, and what happens to an operator who fails. We draft frameworks that hold in three directions at once — acceptable to residents, enforceable by the estate, workable for a professional operator. Rules written by lawyers who have never turned over a property tend to fail the third test; rules written by operators alone tend to fail the first.
What is the honest revenue number?
We model earning potential property by property, against real market data for the specific location, under the 180-night legal cap — not against a brochure fantasy of year-round occupancy. Owners make good decisions when they are given real numbers, and an operation launched on inflated projections fails twice: first financially, then reputationally.
How does it physically run?
Housekeeping in a location ninety minutes from the nearest commercial laundry. Linen logistics at altitude. Access control without a front desk. Emergency response when the nearest hospital is across the mountain. The operational architecture has to be designed for the actual place, and most of what we know about designing it was learned the hard way, on site.
Operations
Where we take on an estate, we run it.
We operate as the estate’s management company: the single operator, accountable to the estate, running every rental property to one standard. For each house we take over the entire commercial and operational life of the property.
We license it.
Prefectural notification under the minpaku law, fire safety works and certification, and the estate’s own approval process. Then the guest registers, bi-monthly occupancy reports and running 180-night count that keep the registration alive afterwards.
We prepare it.
Holiday homes are furnished for the families that own them, and a paying guest is not family. Personal effects secured, tired furniture replaced, and every soft item the guest touches swapped for commercial grade: matched crockery in the right counts, proper cookware, hotel linen on a laundry rotation, the full amenity set. Then professional photography — the hero image is the single frame that decides whether a guest keeps scrolling, and it deserves to be shot thirty ways and chosen once.
We sell it.
Bilingual listings written to a native standard in both languages, distributed across the international platforms and the Japanese domestic channels the international platforms cannot reach, all calendar-synchronised, plus direct booking. Pricing is dynamic, revised continuously against demand, booking pace and season. The logic of the cap is that every night spent must be a night worth spending: peak periods are priced to their true worth and low-value shoulder nights are deliberately held closed.
We host it.
Bilingual guest service seven days a week, from first enquiry to the post-checkout review. Guests are screened before confirmation, not after arrival. Check-in is contactless through smart locks, with a code generated for each booking and dead by checkout, so no key ever changes hands and no code outlives its guest. Every guest receives the house manual, the estate’s conduct rules, the parking requirements and the waste rules in their own language before they arrive. During the stay there is one number, answered around the clock — and it is ours, not the owner’s and not the neighbour’s.
We keep it.
Housekeeping runs to written specification with photographic verification, never from memory. Linen comes from a commercial hotel supplier on scheduled rotation; nothing is washed on site. Maintenance runs through a trusted local network of electricians, plumbers, HVAC technicians and gardeners, with anything above an agreed threshold quoted to the owner before work begins. The house is inspected between stays and through the closed months — in a mountain climate the most valuable service we provide may simply be regular presence: someone who notices the small problem in November rather than discovering the large one in March.
We account for it.
Each month the owner receives a statement showing every booking, gross accommodation revenue, platform commission, our fee, and every pass-through expense with its receipt. Payment lands by the 15th of the following month. Between statements, the owner portal shows the calendar, revenue to date, upcoming arrivals and guest reviews in real time. Nobody should have to wait thirty days to see how their own house is doing.
Through all of it, the owner keeps the house, keeps their own use of it, and stops having to think about the rest.
Operating principles
Six commitments the whole operation rests on.
They are the difference between the operation residents vote to keep and the operation they vote to kill.
One operator, one standard
Every guest on the estate arrives through the same screening, stays under the same rules, and is the responsibility of the same accountable party. When something goes wrong at eleven at night, there is no question of whose problem it is.
Existing residents come first
People bought into these communities for quiet, and their trust is the ground the whole operation stands on. The design starts with them: conduct rules with real enforcement behind them, registered vehicles, disciplined waste handling, quiet hours that mean something, and a 24-hour line that neighbours can call, not only guests. An operation the community welcomes will last for decades. One it merely tolerates will not.
Compliance is the product
In a market where unregistered operation is common, full and visible legality is a competitive position, not a cost line. Every property notified, fire-certified, reported on schedule and held under the 180-night cap. Estates and owners are not buying bookings from us. They are buying the confidence that nothing about the operation can come back to hurt them.
Honest representation
Every listing states what the property actually offers: the real view, the real capacity, the real access, the real limitations. A guest who arrives to find the listing was true leaves happy, returns, and tells others. There is no version of this business that works on disappointed guests.
Value protection, not extraction
The test of the operation is whether it leaves the estate more valuable than it found it. Houses maintained and lived in. Rental income funding renovation. Family properties kept in the family because they can now sustain themselves. A rental reputation that supports property values rather than weighing on them. Any operator should be willing to be measured against that standard, and we are.
Safety and security as infrastructure
No physical keys in circulation. Per-stay codes that expire. Identity screening before confirmation. Bilingual emergency procedures posted in every house. Fire safety built to certification standard, not to minimum. None of this is marketed to guests, and all of it is why estates let us in.
The regulatory frame
180 nights is the design parameter, not the obstacle.
The minpaku law caps a registered property at 180 nights of paid accommodation per calendar year, requires a guest register, and demands reports to the prefecture every two months. The ceiling is hard, and exceeding it puts the registration itself at risk.
Half a year of trading has to produce a full year of return, which forces exactly the discipline that makes a premium operation: concentrate on the nights that matter, price them at their worth, and decline the cheap volume a 365-night operator has to chase. The constraint, taken seriously, produces a better business than its absence would.
All four conversations happen in Japanese, in person, with officials and administrators who want to know who you are before they tell you anything useful. Carrying those relationships, year over year, is a core part of what clients pay for — and the part no platform or software subscription can replace.
Four layers, all moving independently
- The national minpaku law
- Prefectural guidance
- Municipal fire code
- Each estate’s private regulations
Commercial terms
The real number, quoted once.
Consulting engagements are scoped and quoted individually: feasibility studies, regulatory design, association work, operational setup. Property management runs on published terms.
25% of accommodation revenue
Charged on accommodation revenue, and accommodation revenue only.
Cleaning fees net to zero
Charged to the guest on the platform and offset against the cleaner’s invoice, so both sides appear on the owner’s statement and cancel out.
Pass-through expenses at cost
From linen to lightbulbs to licensing fees, billed at what we paid with the receipt attached. No markups, anywhere.
Exclusive for the operational period
An owner under contract cannot self-list or take side bookings, for the unglamorous reason that two people selling one calendar produces double bookings, cancelled guests and platform penalties that outlast the mistake.
Owner personal use is protected and free
Owners block their own dates with reasonable notice. Since the cap closes the house to guests for at least half the year regardless, we plan owner stays into the low-value windows where they cost almost nothing in revenue.
Some operators quote a lower headline fee and recover the difference through margins on cleaning, linen and maintenance. We prefer to quote the real number once and let every monthly statement confirm it.
It is, after all, their house. The entire operation exists so that owning it becomes a pleasure again.
Case study
Fuyodai Estate — the proof of the model.
A gated private resort community of detached holiday homes above Lake Yamanaka in Yamanashi Prefecture, at roughly 1,100 metres on the northern side of Mt. Fuji.
Fuyodai was developed from the 1960s as a summer retreat for Tokyo, two to three hours away, trading on a simple physical fact: when the city sits at 35°C in August, the estate sits near 25°C. It is, in other words, exactly the kind of community described above — that same history, that same promise.
Sanka holds the exclusive mandate to manage short-term rentals within the estate. Every minpaku property at Fuyodai operates under one standard, one guest conduct regime and one accountable operator.
Three settings, each priced on what it genuinely offers
Mt. Fuji view
Direct sightlines to the mountain. The scarcest setting on the estate, and the one guests travel for.
Lake Yamanaka view
Views over the lake and the valley below, with the water changing character through the seasons.
Forest view
Enclosed woodland settings. Quieter and more private, and presented as such rather than as a mountain view.
Each house is assessed, photographed and priced on what it actually offers, so that every guest arrives to exactly what they were promised.
The calendar runs on the Yamanakako demand cycle
- April Cherry blossom
- Late April – early May Golden Week
- July – August Summer and Obon
- Late October – November Autumn foliage
- Late December New Year
- Late January – February Diamond Fuji
Shoulder nights are held closed to protect the 180-night budget. During the Diamond Fuji weeks the sun sets directly into the summit, and the lakeside fills with photographers.
The full stack, on site
Prefectural notification and fire certification for every property, hotel-standard preparation, bilingual listings across international and Japanese domestic channels, dynamic pricing, smart lock access, specification-based housekeeping with photographic verification, commercial linen rotation, and monthly owner reporting with live portal access.
Who we are
Directed by Yuka du Plessis.
Yuka du Plessis is Japanese, based in Japan, and carries the regulatory filings, the owner relationships and the estate negotiations. In a business where the decisive conversations happen in Japanese, face to face, over months, this matters more than any system we run.
The operating side of the company brings hospitality ownership and management experience, including two resorts owned and operated on Koh Phangan, Thailand, together with professional legal training.
We are resort estate property owners ourselves, which enforces a useful discipline: every standard we impose on a client’s house, we imposed on our own first, and every risk we ask an owner to weigh, we have weighed with our own money.
Contact
If you administer an estate, sit on an association, or own a house inside one — we should talk.
Consulting engagements begin with a conversation about the estate and what it needs. For individual owners inside estates where we operate, we start with a visit, a written assessment and a revenue projection built on that house specifically.
- Registered entity
- 三華開発合同会社 (Sanka Kaihatsu G.K.)
- Director
- Yuka du Plessis
- Languages
- Japanese and English