The most documented weakness of the akiya market is staleness. You fall for a house, you make plans, and then you discover it sold months ago, the owner pulled it, or the source page is a dead link. Aggregators keep showing homes that are already gone, because nobody is obliged to tell them the house is sold.
So we audited our own catalogue against the source pages and put a number on it. Of the 549 homes we track, how many are still straightforwardly for sale?
The headline number
- 549 homes in the catalogue.
- 482 (87.8%) are still straightforwardly available: active, recently price-changed, or under negotiation.
- 67 (12.2%) are no longer straightforwardly for sale.
Roughly one in eight homes in a maintained catalogue has already moved out of an available state. On an unmaintained aggregator, that figure only grows with time, because there is no sweep pulling sold and dead listings back out.
Where the stale ones go
The 67 no-longer-available homes break down by their current lifecycle state:
| Lifecycle state | Homes | What it means for a buyer |
|---|---|---|
| Sold | 62 | The house has been sold; it is gone. |
| Withdrawn | 3 | The owner or agent pulled the listing. |
| Source 404 | 2 | The original source page no longer exists. |
Sold homes dominate, which is the healthy signal: these are houses that found a buyer and left the market normally. The withdrawn and source-404 cases are the quiet failures, homes that would still be showing as "for sale" on a site that never re-checks its sources.
The in-between states matter too
Two more states are not "gone" but are not "freely buy it today" either, and an honest catalogue flags them rather than hiding them:
| State | Homes | Why it is flagged |
|---|---|---|
| Under negotiation | 17 | Someone is in the process of buying it; you may be too late. |
| Price changed | 3 | The asking price moved since we first recorded it; check the current figure. |
We count under-negotiation and price-changed homes as still "available" in the headline (you can, in principle, still act on them), but we surface the state so a buyer is never surprised. A house under negotiation is a very different prospect from a fresh listing.
Why this is the whole point
Freshness is not a nice-to-have. It is the difference between a catalogue you can plan around and one that wastes your time. Every home on Engawa carries the date we last verified it and, where we have re-checked it against the town's live index, the date of that check. When a source page 404s or a home sells, the lifecycle state changes and the home stops presenting as a fresh listing. That sweep is exactly what most akiya sites do not run, and it is why their listings rot.
Methodology
We classified every one of the 549 catalogued homes by its lifecycle state as of the data snapshot on 8 July 2026. "Still straightforwardly available" means the active, price-changed, or under-negotiation states; "no longer straightforwardly for sale" means sold, withdrawn, or source-404. The states are maintained by our source-verification sweep, which re-checks source pages and stamps a last-verified date; a page that 404s or shows a home as sold moves the home out of the available set.
These figures are a snapshot of one maintained catalogue at one moment, not a market-wide census; the staleness rate on an unmaintained aggregator is unmeasured here and, we would argue, structurally higher because nothing removes dead listings. Every number is reproduced by a committed analysis script (`backend/seo/research_stats.py`) that reads the live database.
Related reading: our guide on why akiya listings go stale explains the structural causes, and every home on the site shows its own last-verified date and current state.