A bilingual property platform that navigates Japan properly

The situation

Renting or buying property in Japan as a foreign resident is genuinely hard. The market runs in Japanese, on domestic listing systems, with documentation and guarantor requirements that have no equivalent elsewhere. AtHearth's business is removing that friction. The software had to remove it too.

What we did

We built a bilingual property platform where language is a first-class architectural concern, not a translation layer bolted on.

• The content model holds Japanese and English as parallel first-class fields, with fallback behaviour that never shows a user a broken mixed-language page.
• Japanese address handling built properly: the prefecture, city, ward, block, building hierarchy is not a Western street address and treating it as one breaks search.
• Property listing ingestion from domestic sources, with normalisation into a consistent schema and deduplication across overlapping feeds.
• Search with Japanese-aware tokenisation, because naive tokenisation on Japanese text returns nothing useful.
• A guided enquiry and application flow that explains each document and requirement in the user's language at the moment it's needed.
• Scheduling for viewings across timezones.
• Document upload and status tracking through a multi-step application process that can otherwise leave applicants with no idea where they stand.

In the client's words

Vivanet's team impressed us from day one with how quickly they grasped our product vision and the specific constraints of our market. Their work showed a high level of accuracy, they communicated clearly, and they hit every agreed deadline. Costing was transparent and affordable, delivering strong value for a startup like ours. If you're looking for a reliable development partner who understands client needs, ships on time, and stays precise without inflating costs, I strongly recommend Vivanet.

Tomonari Kino, CEO, AtHearth Inc.

The outcome

A platform that makes a famously opaque process navigable in English, with listings and applications running through one system. The team at AtHearth owns and runs it today.