Kozue Dunn: The Bilingual Tokyo Real Estate Agent Leading With Empathy

Kozue Dunn was sitting on a chair next to her mother’s hospital bed in Hyogo Prefecture. Her clients in Tokyo didn’t know that. They still got their viewings coordinated, their questions answered and their paperwork filed. She’d set up a sort of working arrangement in the room — phone charged, earbuds in for calls she needed to take in the hallway — and kept going. Inches away, her mother was seriously ill.

During that time, Kozue ranked first in sales at Terass for two months straight.

It’s hard to find the right word for that. Dedication doesn’t cover it. Neither does discipline. Perhaps it’s grit, or it’s something specific to Dunn — the knowledge that the people counting on her were dealing with their own pressures, and that they were relying on her, whatever was happening in her own life.

Real estate under difficult circumstances

She talks about that period as a moment that changed how she approaches her role, though not in the way you might expect. Instead of a revelation about purpose, it made certain things feel obvious that had felt abstract before. When someone is trying to buy or sell a home in Japan, they’re often also managing something difficult in their personal life. The pressure they’re carrying doesn’t disappear just because you’re discussing garden space and building plans. It gets pushed aside, temporarily. She knows that now in a way that’s much harder to forget.

Tokyo real estate, particularly in the wards where Kozue works — Minato, Shibuya, Meguro, Bunkyo and Chiyoda — attracts a unique clientele. Expats on transfers. Families who need more space than their current apartment allows. International buyers who’ve been told enough times that the Tokyo market is worth paying attention to that they’ve finally started. Sellers dealing with estates, divorces or just the overdue decision to move somewhere that actually fits their lifestyle.

For those international clients in particular, the market here comes with a learning curve that’s steeper than it looks from outside Japan. The way buildings are valued is different: structure and land treated almost separately, a 30-year-old wooden house listed at near-zero structural value in ways that confuse buyers from basically every other country. Negotiation works differently, too. What counts as due diligence, what you can push back on, what’s fixed — none of it maps directly from the U.K., the U.S., Korea or wherever the client is coming from.

How Kozue stands out as a Tokyo real estate agent

Kozue works in both English and Japanese, genuinely rather than technically, which matters in practice for such a complex field. Her international clients have come from the U.K., the U.S., Canada, France, Russia, Korea, China, Singapore, India, Dubai and further afield. Each brings their own set of assumptions about how property transactions are supposed to work. Part of what she does is translate those expectations to the Tokyo reality without making anyone feel like they should have done more research.

One of her clients last year was a Japanese woman who’d been living abroad and discovered that her parents needed her nearby. She had to leave her life overseas, move back to Japan quickly and find somewhere that could work for her, her aging parents and her dog. The in-law suite mattered. So did the garden, for the dog, which in central Tokyo is not an easy thing to find. Kozue found it anyway, working against a tight deadline with someone who was stressed and not entirely sure what the real estate process here was going to look like.

She says she asks a lot of questions before she starts sending listings. Not the standard array, although those come up, but why. What’s actually going on? What is this move supposed to fix, or allow or leave her clients with when it’s done? The garden for the dog wasn’t throwaway information, even though someone in a hurry might have treated it that way. It was what the client needed, and that small effort made her stress much more manageable.

The market doesn’t care. She does.

There’s a part of Kozue’s background worth keeping in mind through all of this: She’s been helping her neighbors understand Japan long before she moved into real estate professionally. Walking people through how things work here, which systems are intuitive and which ones aren’t and what to watch out for. The agent role formalized something she’d been doing informally for a while. Whether that origin explains her approach or just runs parallel to it, she’s been working with international clients across Tokyo long enough to have a good idea of where the friction usually comes from.

After all, the market doesn’t really care what’s happening in a client’s personal life. Interest rates move when they move. Inventory doesn’t wait for complicated circumstances. Part of what Kozue offers, which even her excellent rankings can’t capture, is her ability to hold both of those things at once: the genuine pressure of the market and the genuine complexity of the life the client is living inside of it. She’s not trying to minimize either one. She’s trying to help someone make a decision that works in spite of both weights.

Her mother passed away not long after those two months in Hyogo. Kozue has said that experience sits with her when she’s working with clients who are going through their own difficult moments.

If you’re working through a property search or sale in Tokyo, whether buying or selling, Kozue Dunn is reachable in English or Japanese. She’ll ask you far more questions than you’d expect before you even get to the listings. She’ll ask you why you’re moving, actually listen to the answer and then go to work. That’s not a sales tactic. It’s just how she does it.

Kozue Dunn: A Quick Summary

• Languages: English and Japanese
• Areas: Minato, Shibuya, Meguro, Bunkyo, Chiyoda
• Clients: Expats, international buyers, returning Japanese nationals, estate sales
• Brokerage: Terass
• Contact her through her Website: https://terass.com/, Email: kozue.dunn@terass.com, or Phone: 080-9036-5550