J: Hey guys! R: Hi!
J: It's moving season in Japan and we're moving! R: Yay!
J: I know it's really hard for you guys to read my emotions but I'm very, very excited
for this. And since we’re going through all of this, we thought we’d tell you how
you can look for apartments in Japan.
R: Some of the things about looking for apartments are really different
from how we do things in America, so we’re going to go over those parts, too.
J: First of all, if you just want to look
at apartments, you can use many different websites. We used one called suumo.jp. It’s
all in Japanese, but if you’re trying to get an apartment on your own then you probably
at least need to be able to understand enough to use this website, maybe.
How you can use it is search by area, and you can select prefectures, and then any or
all the cities inside that prefecture. So for example, Aichi prefecture, and then I’ll
just select this one city.
R: This opens up a page with a bunch of apartments
for rent in that city. You can adjust your search for specific requirements on the side,
like minimum and maximum price. Minimums can be as low as maybe 20,000 yen a month, or
very roughly $200. Those places are likely to be places like one room apartments for
university students. High end apartments can be thousands of dollars. Apartments inside
big cities will obviously be more expensive and smaller than apartments outside the city,
whereas apartments in more rural areas will usually be a lot cheaper. Jun and I picked
a reasonably priced apartment at 61,000 yen a month, or about $610. There was also a room
on the first floor a little cheaper at $580 a month. Top floors can often be more expensive
because they have better views and they’re less noisy.
J: If you click on this, you can refine your search even more, by selecting things like
the type of material you want the building to be made out of. I’d recommend “鉄筋”
or “鉄骨” which is reinforced concrete. This is the least likely type of building
to collapse during a big earthquake, and well, Japan is always going to have big earthquakes,
so at least you can try to be prepared. You can also select for things like places with
parking lots, which will cost extra money every month, or places that may allow pets,
which will also likely cost more.
R: It was really important to me and Jun to find a place that allowed us to have pets.
However, those aren’t very common so this
reduced the number of apartments available to us by like ten times, and of those apartments
that allow pets, a lot of those actually only allow dogs and not cats, since cats can be
more smelly- J: Or scratch walls.
R: Yeah, they can mess up the apartments a little bit more. And a lot of apartments that
allow pets are usually more run down and they’re not as nice looking.
J: Yeah, not at all. R: You have to pay a lot of extra money.
But you can sometimes find special pet apartments
where they specifically built that apartment for people with pets.
So like outside they’ll have a little shed that’s specifically for washing your pet.
J: I was really surprised. I’ve never seen something like that before.
R: We looked at one that had little cat doors
on all of the doors in the apartment, which was really cute.
J: Once you find an apartment you like, you have to do something that I think is different
from your country. Here, all apartments go through a middle man, which is a real estate
office. You can’t just contact the owner unless you know the owner. So, if you find
an apartment you like, you go to that real estate office, you talk to them, and they
will take care of everything for you.
They will even drive you to the apartment you like so you can look at it, too.
R: Yeah, and they’ll do things like serve
you tea and they will help you look for other apartments and stuff,
but the kicker is that you’re paying for all this.
And you’re paying a lot.
It typically costs one month’s worth of rent, maybe a little bit more,
that you have to pay to the real estate office for their “help.”
Even if they don’t do anything, like if you pick out your apartment
on your own online and all you do is go to their office and sign the paper, you still
have to pay them hundreds of dollars.
I was so shocked when I found this out.
I was really upset. I was like, I don’t want their help if I have to pay them $600!
I don’t need that! I can do it myself!
J: Something else you have to keep in mind is that there are a lot of different real estate companies,
but not every apartment is connected to all of them.
So if you find two different apartments online that you’d like to visit,
but they’re both through different companies, then you have to go to
each office separately to have them drive you to their apartment.
But don’t worry,
you don’t pay them anything unless you get an apartment.
R: And also, this is one area of Japan where you are fairly likely to run into some problems
as a foreigner. There are a decent number of apartment owners who will not rent to foreigners
at all. They have reasons for this like the language barrier, or they’ve had foreign
tenants in the past who caused problems, or like they left the country without paying
all of their rent, or messing up the apartments and stuff.
It was a little easier for me to find an apartment because I had Jun.
So he could take care of everything for us, it wasn’t
just me looking for an apartment by myself.
But even still, when we were applying for
our apartment, our real estate agent still had to call the owner, and he was like,
“By the way, the wife is a foreigner…
But she’s spent a lot of time in Japan and she speaks Japanese!"
And he made this call when I was sitting right in front of him.
It made me feel really bad about myself.
J: Yeah, I'm sorry.
Fees for moving into apartments here also kind of suck a lot.
Sometimes you have to pay something called key money to the owner
of the apartment you’re moving into, which is equal to one or two months of rent.
And you don’t get that money back. It’s like a monetary gift.
R: And there could also be things like cleaning fees, renovation fees, insurance fees, fees
for changing the locks, or very frequently a security deposit. And the security deposit
is something that would be equal to 1 to 3 months’ worth of rent. But it’s different
from America in that you don’t automatically get all of it back if you don’t damage the
apartment. Apparently here in Japan you get less of it back the longer you stay in your
apartment. And very frequently if you want to own a pet, you have to pay additional key
money or security deposits. We paid an extra $1,800 just for the right to own a pet.
J: 3 months’ worth of rent. R: Yeah, 3 months’ worth of rent. Many apartments
also require you to have a guarantor, who is someone who’s going to pay for rent or
something in case something happens to you and you can’t pay for it yourself. But a
lot of apartments these days don’t let you just go get a signature from your dad or a
relative anymore. You actually have to go through a guarantor company, which is a company
that will do that service for you. You just have to pay them extra money. Usually something
like half a month’s worth of rent. And… J: It’s not going to end.
R: When you’re looking at rent, that main number usually isn’t the final number, either.
There’s also often something like a monthly common areas service fee or sometimes other
things as well.
J: So for us, just to move into our apartment,
it cost us about $4,000, even though our rent is $600. And even if we didn’t get an apartment
where pets are allowed, we would still have to pay about $2,000 or something.
R: But keep in mind that all of these fees and even rent can be negotiable, so a good
real estate agent will try to talk the owner down on some of those things. For example,
we got our first month of rent free.
And even then it was still $4,000.
J: Yeah, so these fees and everything can make moving to a new place less exciting.
R: Pain. J: But we need a cat!
R: Anyway, this is all of the basic information you should need to know to get an apartment
in Japan. I hope this was helpful for you guys!
J: Thanks for watching. R: Bye!