If the idea of getting a place out in the
Japanese countryside appeals to you, whether it be to get out of the city, for
a large house, for lower prices, then you may already have heard of the stories of
abandoned houses being sold cheaply or even given away for free. In this video
I'm going to talk about our experience of buying an abandoned house in Japan in
more detail including the process we went through and the costs. We're going
to start the renovation soon - I'll update you guys as soon as we start. The
information in this video is based on research we did before and after buying
and our experience so far. First I'll give a bit of background about vacant
and abandoned houses in Japan, talk about why we bought one ,then I'll talk about
the process of buying what to look out for, costs including renovation and
associated costs, hidden costs, financing, and also my thoughts on how to find one
for those who are looking. This video is going to be a bit long so I've put markers
in the description if you want to skip the parts you're interested in. At the moment we live in a regular
three-bedroom detached house in a small town in Ibaraki about an hour's drive
from central Tokyo or around 50 minutes by train. You can commute to Tokyo from
here, in fact my wife does. It's a typical rice growing region and the town is
surrounded by paddy fields. Our abandoned house is nearby in Japan vacant houses are called "akiya".
You may have heard of this term - there's been a bit of news about empty houses in
Japan recently. Even though akiya are often referred to as abandoned houses they're
not necessarily abandoned, but unoccupied. They may be managed by the owner or a
real estate agent. Of course, some houses are genuinely abandoned. The number of
akiya in Japan is only going to increase, particularly in the countryside,
with Japan's ageing and decreasing population, increased urbanization,
Japanese preference for new homes, and falling rural property prices. About
13.5% percent of houses in Japan are vacant so you might think that
it would be easy to find an akiya to buy. I mean you could probably choose a
random country town and walk down the street and spot an empty house quite quickly. But for those are looking to buy an akiya you might have found that it's actually
not that easy, which can be a bit frustrating. This is reflected in the
statistics. For example here in Ibaraki Prefecture, which is roughly
representative of Japan as a whole, 14.6 percent or 184,000 houses (that includes houses and apartments of all shapes and sizes) are
vacant, which is slightly above the national average of 13.5 percent that I
mentioned earlier. And of those vacant houses 56 percent are available
to rent just no one's renting them, 36% are unmanaged - these are the abandoned
houses, so they're not in the market for rent or sale, some holiday houses and
second homes also make up a small percentage, but once you add all of that
up it turns out that less than 3% of the akiya are available for sale. It's an
interesting statistic and illustrates why it's not that easy to buy one. There are a few reasons why not many are
up for sale. With many houses vacant some may assume that no one would want
to buy their property, the low rural property prices that I mentioned earlier
reduce the incentives to sell. People might be reluctant to sell property
that's been in the family for generations, especially if it's for
peanuts, or the property might require extensive cleaning clearing or
renovation and if you're not going to get much of a price for it, or if you
think it might not sell then it may not be worth your while. For real estate
agents the commissions on a cheap property are going to be quite low so
they're not going to be particularly interested either. One incentive the sell
might be to avoid having to pay tax on the property, which you need to pay even
if you don't live in it, but from what I can tell penalties are not that strictly
enforced and the worst thing that can happen perhaps is that the tax office
will claim the property. But if it's not worth that much it's really no big loss.
So some property owners might decide to abandon the property altogether, and if
they have children the children might not be interested in looking after the
property either. It's not so difficult to renounce an inheritance in Japan, so say
you live in Tokyo and your parents who live in the country pass away you
could refuse to inherit the property and it probably would go abandoned. You
might particularly want to do this if there was a debt on the property which
you would inherit too, whether it be to the tax office or to the bank. You might
wonder why we wanted to buy a place in rural Japan. Well, as you can imagine, it's
not as an investment. I grew up in Australia and have fond memories of
playing footy and cricket in the backyard with my brother and cousins. I wanted
the same for my boys. Right now we don't even have a garden. So I wanted a lawn to
play sports, some space to do some gardening, and maybe even grow some
vegetables, plus we wanted an outdoor space where we as a family could relax
and barbecue. I love barbecues but they're kind of
frowned upon where we're living now in a built-up space and probably for good
reason. We also wanted a bigger place for when my parents come and stay with
us when they visit from Australia, also when friends visit. So price was a factor
of course but it wasn't the most important thing. We aslo wanted to stay
in the same area close to my wife's mother, and so that our boys could go to
the same school. If you want something cheap in this area,
where we are now, you can buy a second-hand four bedroom detached house
on 170 square meters from the local real estate agent for about five million yen
but you could move into straight away. Or you can rent a four-bedroom house for
around 60,000 yen a month, but you won't get much of a garden there. Japanese
buyers tend to prefer smaller blocks and like to fill the block with their house
with little space for a garden they often build their houses up next to each other,
even in the country, in towns as well as in hamlets. It makes sense to use
as much land as possible for farming, also the larger the landed house the
bigger the property tax bill is, but I was ideally looking for around two
thousand square meters or half an acre. However it's not so easy to find large
blocks of residential land even in the countryside. Large blocks are usually
sold to developers who subdivide the land and sell it off. I saw a 1300 square
metre block nearby on the market for around twenty two million yen just too
much for us and for other people - last time I checked you still for sale. So I
thought our best bet was to buy a farmhouse on a larger block of land. The
idea of a farmhouse also appealed to me as a farming area is a bit more
isolated, they have sheds that I could perhaps use for a business. But when I
looked into that I didn't find many on the market any that I did find were
really expensive and outside our budget. Plus we're not registered farmers and
are not allowed to buy farm land so couldn't buy a farm house unless it had
been converted or subdivided into residential land. To register as a farmer
you need to demonstrate that you'll be able to operate a viable farming
business which usually involves a business plan and buying a minimum
amount of land. In Ibaraki it's 5,000 square metres so that's when I started
looking for an akiya. But we were really restricted in our search because of our
need to stay in the same area, otherwise when I was searching for places I found
some real interesting properties further out from Tokyo - I'll put some links
below. You may have heard of the akiya bank,
the government program that matches vacant property with tenants and buyers
at cheap prices. I won't talk in detail about this as we didn't buy our property
through an akiya bank so I don't have any direct experience buying it this way, but
we did look into it as an option. One advantage of the akiya bank is that in
some areas you can get subsidies for renovations or tax breaks but it depends
on certain conditions such as age, hiring locally, or number of children. It varies
by location so you need to check. However there weren't any properties
listed in the akiya bank that were in our local area plus the listed prices didn't
strike me as that cheap. I know you can negotiate the price with the owner, but
there wasn't anything that really suited us, so we thought the best way to find a
place would be through word of mouth through our friends or acquaintances. Maybe
someone knew someone who had an akiya that they were interested in selling or
maybe someone was looking to downsize from a place that we're living in.
My mother-in-law runs a "kissaten", which is a japanese-style cafe, and has
lots of friends and acquaintances in the local area. So we kind of put the word
out on the street that we were looking for a place. We didn't really get
anywhere but one day one of our friends noticed a property in the local
newsletter and let us know. This would be the property that we'd eventually buy. It
was being auctioned by the Ibaraki tax claim control office - it's the
governmental organisation responsible for unpaid tax debts as I've mentioned
earlier, property tax is an issue in holding onto akiya.
Some people just decide to stop paying, who maybe can't afford to pay, and if the
owner dies with a tax debt on the property the children may not want to inherit,
which is what happened in our case. So the tax office took possession of the
property. The tax office holds a mixed bag of residential, farm and forest land.
And in most cases I still think that the prices are a little more expensive than
they should be. Each prefecture has their own tax claim
control office if you go to their websites you can see a listing of all
the properties they have available for auction. I'll put some Japanese search
terms in the description below but you will need to be able to read Japanese to
be able to understand - they don't have much information in English - or you could
just use Google Translate to get an idea. The tax offices hold regular auctions
some auctions are held online by Yahoo auctions and some auctions are held in
person at their head offices. Both the Yahoo auction and the
in person auction are blind, sealed bids. In order to participate you have to put
down 10% of the minimum bid as a refundable deposit, you get one bid and
at the end of the time period whoever has the highest bid is the winner of the
auction. In our case we took part in the auction at the tax office itself.
The auction was held over one hour. It was a bit nerve-wracking as there were
quite a lot of people there as they were auctioning many properties at the same
time, and we didn't know who else was bidding for our property, and how much
they were going to bid. We put in a bid for 3 million yen and at the end of the
hour it turned out there was one other bidder who put in a bid for just over
the minimum price of 2.9 million. It would have been ideal to have won by
less but at the end of the day we'd won and I was just happy that we weren't the only
bidder and hadn't just bid against ourselves. The property was not just
vacant but also abandoned with lots of cleaning to do. The other issue was that
it was missing an official border. This factored into the lack of interest and
price. I think the price was fair given the size of the land it just under 1,400
square metres, but I think if the akiya market functioned a little more
efficiently you would see lower prices and prices going closer to zero like
you've seen on the news. Buying from the tax office doesn't have any age, job or
family requirements. If you win the bid you're free to do what you want with the
property, just make sure that the land is a classification that you're allowed to
purchase, such as a residential land, which anyone can buy, and not farm land
which requires you to be a registered farmer. You can get details of the
properties including the address and also the minimum bid from the tax office
website. If you contact them, Japanese likely required, they may come out to
visit you and run through the whole process and give you a few more details
about the property. Since the address of the property is listed on the website
you can go and visit the property yourself directly though technically
you're not supposed to go inside the house. The tax office may not even have
the keys. Also there may be an occupant in the house, but if you're serious about
buying it'd be best to inspect the property
beforehand, which is what we did. We managed to find a way in and have a look
around and explore - it was a bit scary at first going into the abandoned house, but
it was well worth it in the end. We also spoke to the neighbors to check if there
was any kind of story to the house. Read the information carefully - as I mentioned
earlier, one thing to look out for is whether the house is occupied or not.
Sometimes the owner may still be living there but has fallen
behind their tax payments, and the tax office has taken possession of their
property. You can still buy the property but you'd have to deal with evicting the
occupant yourself. I wouldn't be comfortable evicting what might be a
vulnerable or elderly person from their family home, so we steered well clear of
these sort of properties. In fact we actually did find a property nearby that
also suited our conditions but there was someone in there so we gave that one a wide berth. If you're considering buying a vacant or abandoned house some things
you need to look out for are: how much work does it need? Depending on the age
of the house you're probably going to need to upgrade the plumbing and the
electricals. Also if there are any problems with the foundations that's
going to be a very expensive thing to fix. Is it affected by termites? Termites
are a huge problem in Japan. Sometimes you can tell whether there are termites
by trails leading to the house but other times they may be hidden inside the wood
and harder to notice at first glance. Of course one big thing that people are
concerned about when buying properties in Japan is their resistance to
earthquakes. Japan updates its earthquake standards from time to time
and is one of the reasons why Japanese people tend to prefer newer homes to old
ones. So you need to consider that and take it into account if you're planning
renovations. As I mentioned earlier if you're buying an akiya, it maybe a little bit
more difficult to conduct a thorough inspection before the purchase. In
addition, particularly if you're buying through a public auction, you should
double-check whether there is an official border or not. The land we were
buying had been subdivided from a larger farm so we were buying the residential
land portion and not the surrounding farmland, so there wasn't an official
border for some of the boundaries. Now, you can get a border done and we have
got ours done but it is a risk. I mean there are certain things you need to do
and you need to hire a professional to organise it for you, so you do need to
take that into consideration. I'll talk in more detail about the implications of
not having a border later on. So there will be some risk and you do need a
back-up plan. In our case our back-up plan was to
knock down the house and build a new property on the land. Thankfully we
haven't had to resort to that. Since buying we've had a full and thorough
inspection carried out from top to bottom. The only issue that we didn't
know about before buying was that a septic tank has been damaged by a tree root so
we'll need to deal with that. The foundations, posts and beams have
been resilient towards earthquakes over the last 30 years a barely budged so
we're very confident in the structural integrity of the house. Of course when we
do the renovations we'll take into consideration strengthening measures
against earthquakes. There are taxes to consider when buying
a secondhand property in Japan, including akiya. The largest tax we've had to pay
so far, and the one that's caught us most by surprise, is the registration tax. It's
a one-time tax that applies to any property purchase in Japan. Not the tax
itself, we knew that was coming, but it was the
amount that caught us by surprise. Now we didn't do a very good job with our
research and we didn't realize that we would have to pay the tax on the fixed
asset tax book value of the property, not the purchase price. The fixed asset tax
book value is the value of the property that the government holds. The government
reassesses this value every three years through some sort of audit. I don't
exactly know how it's calculated but there is some process and I've heard
though it's hard to change. One way is through subdivision of the land, another
way is if the buildings on the land substantially change, or if there's an
error in the record. In our case the property was subdivided five years ago
at which time it was assessed that the value of the property was 12.5 million
yen so the tax rate of 2% was applied to this value, not the 3 million yen that we
paid for it. Therefore we had to pay two hundred and sixty thousand yen to
register the property in our name. So you need to keep this in mind if you're
purchasing an akiya, because the fixed asset tax book value is likely to be higher
than the purchase price, so even if you got a property for zero yen you're going
to be on the hook for this tax. We've also got property acquisition tax coming
up which we haven't paid yet although there are deductions if the property is
going to be your primary residence. But we estimate this tax is also going to be
around two hundred and sixty thousand yen based on the current book value.
We'll also need to pay the fixed asset tax and the city planning tax which are
generally (annual) property taxes and are going to come to around a hundred and sixty
thousand yen a year. I'll put some links in the description below if you want to
explore this topic on taxes in a bit more detail. I did read somewhere that
there were potentially tax breaks in some prefectures for people who are
buying akiya and enquired at our local city office but unfortunately there was
nothing there available to us. Also the tax office, who we were buying the land
from, were not offering us any tax breaks there either.
But one advantage of buying through the tax office is there was no real estate agent
commission, which is usually around 3%. One issue I mentioned earlier was the
border. Now our land was subdivided from farmland so some parts of our property
didn't have an official border. In Japan borders are usually marked by stones or
metal plates. To register a border you need to contract a land surveyor who
specialises in borders to make measurements of the property and also
indicate where the marker stones should go. He'll then organise with neighbours
and local government officials to come around, all at the same time, to inspect
the border and then give their approval. Once that's done the surveyor will then
put the markers in place and submit the details to the Legal Affairs Bureau. This
process can be expensive and time-consuming. The main implications of
not having an official border is that it's unlikely that you'll be able to get
a mortgage or a secured loan and also buyers might be a bit wary about buying
a property without an official border (if you decide to sell). It's not so common and generally real
estate agents will only accept properties that have a border. But it's
worth double-checking anyway and if you're buying from the tax office
they'll also state in their prospectus whether that the border is an issue or
not. So we knew what we were getting into and the risk involved, but decided to go
ahead anyway. Fortunately it all worked out well for us because the border is
now done and dusted. We were lucky in that we got an
introduction from a friend to a land surveyor who charged us a little bit
less than expected although it's still expensive amount of 300,000 yen. We're
glad to get that out of the way though. Now you can still get an unsecured loan
without an official border, though it just reduces your options. There are
separate fees for taking out a mortgage in Japan which I won't go into detail now but
they would apply to all properties. regardless of whether you are getting in
akiya or not. Our house is a Japanese minka or kominka
style house sometimes called an old folk house in English. They are traditional
houses with the distinctive steep roof and deep eaves that used to be a common
housing style for farmers and artisans. Nowadays there a typical style of
farmhouse - you see them throughout the Japanese countryside. getting a minka was
probably the second priority for us after land size. A minka in good
condition and renovated nicely is really impressive. We'll see if we can achieve
that. For me they have a lot more character than most of the modern
standard houses in Japan but on the other hand they can be more expensive to
renovate and maintain. Imagine how much a roof like this costs to repair.
Especially the older ones that are over a hundred years old will likely need foundation work which gets expensive. We were warned when we
were researching getting a minka that renovations could cost as much as a new
house. In fact, since we bought the place, we've visited some model houses that have
been done beautifully but have cost up to 50 million yen. You might also be
wondering why I'm crouching right now. Well, this is a pretty long video - I'm
just trying to mix things up. At the beginning I kind of planned to do
almost all of the renovations myself, just leaving the electricals and
plumbing stuff like that to professionals. We also considered just doing the bare
essentials and moving in and then renovating bit by bit while we lived
here. Since then we've had a bit of a change of mind. We really want to do a
lot of work to the house, really do it justice, and make it look really,
really nice and that would take quite a long time way to do it just by ourselves
going the DIY route, if we had the skills to do it as nicely as we imagined. So as
a result we're working with an architect, who is a friend of ours,
and also we're discussing it with the original builder, as well as some other
renovation companies. And we're just waiting on a few more quotes and we'll
make a decision hopefully very very shortly. I'll give a more detailed
breakdown on some of the quotes in another video but to give you an idea of
the renovation costs based on the quotes we've received so far, I think if
you're going down the DIY route, assuming you'd still get a professional to do the
electricals and the plumbing, I reckon the place could be done for about 60 to
70 million yen... Hold your horses, obviously still having problems with Japanese
numbers there. I should have said six to seven million yen, not sixty to seventy million.
That includes the roof and that includes fixing the septic tank. Of course it
depends a lot on what sort of materials you are going to use and really how much you
are going to be able to do yourself. Now we're probably gonna spend a bit of money on
what might be considered luxuries, like real wood floors, a wood-burning stove, a
loft, stairs, an onsen style bath, as well as wood decking all around the house. To
go with one of the big renovation companies the price is going to start at
around twenty five million yen. A slightly smaller company around twenty-
twenty two million yen, and working with an architect and a builder around
fifteen million yen. There are advantages and disadvantages of each. For example
going with one of the big companies you get a five-year warranty and servicing
during that period if anything did go wrong but they're also the most
expensive. Now those costs own include the garden.
We're gonna knock down four sheds out here. We've got quotes already from
demolition companies. It'll cost about 1.2 million yen to knock down the sheds and
clear the rubbish. That includes some of the existing rubbish within the sheds.
That gives you a bit of an idea. We're keeping the two storied house that used
to have the tractor and we're going to renovate that at a later date, which is
an additional cost. We'll do the rest of the garden ourselves but obviously there
are costs involved there. We've already bought quite a few tools, for example a
clearing saw, a chainsaw, an axe and a wood chipper. But these are things that
we'll continue to use as we live in the property. In terms of other costs we
haven't really spent so much so far on cleaning, but we haven't been in a huge
rush. We've kind of been able to break stuff up and put it bit by bit in with the
regular garbage, which is collected twice a week for the burnable rubbish and
once a week for unburnable. I've rented a light truck a couple of times and taken
rubbish to the garbage centre myself. it costs about 155 yen per 10 kilograms.
For example the other day I took around three hundred and sixty kilograms in
about three trips and cost roughly five thousand five hundred
yen. Once it's all done I'll let you know how much in total we have spent on cleaning.
Financing has being the most complicated part of this project and looking back we
could have been a bit smarter about it and done a bit more research. So in this
section what I'll do is I'll talk about what we've done to finance the purchase
so far, how we're going to finance the renovations, and also I'll talk about the
most suitable bank I think for this kind of project. First of all I'm a foreigner
here on a spouse visa that has been in Japan for less than two years, and most of my
income is based overseas, so I'm highly unlikely to be able to get a home loan
in Japan. Fortunately, my wife's Japanese with a full-time job so when I talk
about "we" here it's really my wife. All of the banks we spoke to didn't have a
problem in financing an akiya, so that wasn't a problem in itself, but we did
face two obstacles when trying to obtain finance to carry out this project. First,
and this is due to it being an auction through the tax office which is not a
common way of purchasing a property in Japan, while we could get pre-approval
for the mortgage before the auction, when buying from the tax office you have one
week to pay the full amount in cash after the date of the winning bid. In our
case it was three million minus the ten percent deposit that we had put down to
participate in the auction. According to the bank that we were speaking to this
one week time frame didn't give them enough time to process the official
mortgage application between winning the bid and confirming the purchase price,
obtaining relevant documentation, and finalising the loan approval to be able
to release the funds within that one week. Some people get bridge loans to cover this amount and once the mortgage is
approved pay it off but some banks don't allow you to use your mortgage to pay
off a separate loan so you need to check this carefully beforehand. We didn't want
to do this as we wanted to maintain flexibility - we didn't know how long it
would take to clean the property and organize the renovations which we wanted
to fund with a mortgage or loan but I didn't know which bank or product would
be most suitable at that stage, so we had to use cash from our savings and
investments, which was not ideal. Now we only spoke to one bank before the
purchase who turned out to be not very good, and looking back we should have
spoken to a few more banks to see if they could have been able to help us
there. We've found in the process of looking at loans to pay for
the renovations that Japanese banks vary greatly in their requirements and
policies so it's possible that there are banks out there that might have been
more flexible. The second issue is specific to our situation in that we
were purchasing a property without completed official border so that would
have prevented us from getting a mortgage anyway.
Banks won't approve secured loans on properties without an official border. In
regards to banks, when buying a rural property that requires a bit of work in
the yard as well as the house, we found JA Bank, that's the Japan Agricultural
Cooperative bank. to be the most flexible. Most banks we found won't allow you to use loan
funds to pay for yard work, for example demolishing sheds, cutting down trees, but
JA does. Anyone can join JA Bank, you don't have to be a farmer. They have two
options: one is the loan secured to your property ie mortgage, and the amount you
can borrow really depends on the property and your financial situation;
an unsecured renovation loan or "reform" loan, as they call it in Japan, of up to 15
million yen. JA Bank allow you pay multiple suppliers, whereas some banks
only allow you to pay one contractor to do the entire project. So we can pay, for example,
different contractors to do the house, you know, whether it be a builder,
electrician, plumber, separately. You don't have to pay through one single
contractor and we can also pay for the demolition of sheds as well separately
through another company. Note that the interest rate on a reform loan is
around three to four percent, and higher than a mortgage which is typically less
than 1% currently. Also I don't think it's different from other countries,
but you can't use a mortgage or a reform loan to pay for DIY work. You're
expected to pay a professional. If you want to fund DIY you'll need to
get a personal loan which has a slightly higher interest rate and also a lower
maximum borrowing amount, around 50 to 80 million yen in Japan So you can see buying an akiya is not as
cheap as that may seem, even if the property were free. Renovation and other
costs quickly add up. Even if you renovate the house it'll depreciate
straightaway, and in 10 to 20 years it'll be worth very little again. Especially
when you consider that there is a large generation of baby boomers in their 70s
living in the countryside. Japanese life expectancy is high but the cold reality
is that over the next 20 years more and more houses are going to go vacant and abandoned. So after hearing all that you may wonder is it really worth it. If
you're looking to buy an akiya, I think it's got to come down to reasons other
than price. There are cheaper ways to buy a house in Japan if you just want a roof
over your head. But if you're doing it for lifestyle reasons, want to enjoy the
process, or want to do something a little bit different, you know it could be a
pretty good option for you, particularly if you're going to stay in Japan long term.
Generally, it's going to be cheaper than buying land and building a new house. And
if you're flexible and can live further out from one of the centres, or live in
any part of Japan, then you really might be able to find a bargain - someplace that
has large land sizes, doesn't require much renovation and is going to be
cheap. For us it will certainly be cheaper than finding a similarly sized
block in this area and building a new house on it. Otherwise renting would
likely be cheaper over the short to medium term, especially if you go through
something like an akiya bank, where you can get some pretty reasonable rates on
long-term contracts. We were tired of renting - we wanted the freedom and the
utility of having our own place knowing that we can do anything we want with it,
and also having the security that it is ours in the long term. If you're weighing
up moving out of Tokyo or a big city into the countryside
then the difference in price is going to be even larger. In the future I might do
some videos of life around here, not that we're in the deep dark countryside. Given
though that finding an akiya is relatively difficult given that there
aren't that many on sale, I think I'd advise people who are looking for a
place to really speak to friends and acquaintances - lots of these akiya aren't on
the market for reasons I've mentioned before but if you ask around you might
just find that there are people who are willing to sell or know of people who
are willing to sell, so maybe go around, speak to akiya banks, local government local
real estate agents, they may know of properties that just aren't listed. Some
areas also have other programs that help you find akiya, particularly if
you're going to be setting up a local business or maybe have a look at the
local tax office and find property like we did. You never know, there might be
something available, particularly if you're not in the akiya banks target
demographic. Remember you can negotiate the price in most cases. From what I've
seen the listed property prices are generally higher than the true market
value. There are more and more companies these days that are buying old houses,
including kominka, renovating them and selling them on. Sure, you will be paying
a higher price for these properties but it does take away a lot of the risk in
buying an akiya and also saves your doing a lot of the cleaning and renovating yourself
if you're that way inclined. I've put some links in the description to useful
websites that I've come across in my research that hopefully you might find
useful as well in your search for a property. Otherwise feel free to ask me
any questions in the comment section. Also stay tuned and if you're not
subscribed already please subscribe and like this video. I'm going to start the
videos on the renovations hopefully very soon. Thanks for watching!
