apartment hunt pt 2

Heads-up, this one’s going to be a reaaaaally long post. I haven’t really posted about the apartment hunt since the prequel, so I’ll walk through the entire process of what we went through, from the start.

Prior to moving to Tokyo, I had actually already started the hunt. Towards the second half of december, I was looking for apartments on a few websites, and I found that I liked https://apts.jp/ the most since it had the most comprehensive filters and relatively up-to-date information. https://apartments.gaijinpot.com/en/rent was another website I looked at, but I think many of the listings had outdated or inaccurate information, and the website was not very responsive when I reached out for inquiries. I wasn’t sure what to expect from the inquiries (whether the form would send a reach-out to the apartment owner, management company, someone from apts.jp, etc.), but it seems like the standard process is that each one of these online listings has an associated realtor, so when you submit an inquiry, you’re actually reaching out to a realtor.

I had to estimate how much time the apartment hunt would take because I had to decide whether we needed to book temporary housing or not, and if so, for how long. I came up with a few scenarios in my head.

a) [completely unrealistic dream scenario] miraculously, we would come across the most perfect apartment ever online and sign it before even coming to Tokyo. Then, we wouldn’t need temporary housing. At the time, I thought the main issue with that plan was that it would probably be best to see the apartment in person before signing, even if it would’ve been nice to have the mental security of getting a place beforehand, the risk wouldn’t be worth it. Later I would discover this plan (even setting aside the practical concern) would be nearly impossible for many, many logistical reasons.

b) [slightly more realistic, but turned out to still be impossible dream scenario] assuming that we would need to do some amount of in-person due diligence, I was hoping to have a set of apartments ready to go before coming, schedule all the apartment viewings before school started on the 7th (we arrived in Tokyo on Dec 31), then apply and sign maybe within another week or so, securing an apartment by mid-January. Giving another 1-2 weeks of buffer, hopefully we would be able to move out of the temporary housing stress-free by end of January.

So yeah, scenario b) is what I had in my head before coming to Tokyo, and thus I booked our current place for until end of January. For the sleuthy detectives out there, you may have noticed that it is now mid-February and yes, we are still living in our temporary spot, so spoiler alert: plan b did not work out as I had imagined.

In the first move post, I had already mentioned that I knew all the realtors were going to be on vacation until January 6th, so I suppose I should’ve known my dreams of signing an apartment by January 7th were going to be crushed. That’s ok, that’s what the 1-2 week buffer was for, right? We had gotten lunch with some friends-of-friends soon after and when they heard that we only had our current place booked until end of January, they warned us and said, you two should look into extending that until at least mid-February, if you’re lucky. Longer if you think you’ll be picky (which you should be). That was probably the best piece of moving-to-Japan advice I’ve received so far, honestly.

We decided to extend our apartment until Feb 22, which luckily it was still available for that period. Miles hasn’t been a huge fan of our current spot because it’s really cold - I mean to be fair, I’m not a huge fan either (mostly unhappy about the tiny kitchen), but I think I’m a bit more tolerant to the cold than he is. We were both hoping to move out way before Feb 22nd, but we agreed the buffer would be good for a worst-case-scenario, and some overlap wouldn’t be that bad to have a lower stress moving process.

So now we’re onto scenario c) hopefully we can sign something by end of January, and then we’ll have at least a week or two to slowly move our stuff to the new apartment, acquire furniture, etc.

So, back to the realtor - I was in contact with someone prior to moving to Tokyo, and we had a video call and had exchanged several emails back-and-forth. I would send her listings that I liked, and she would reply saying basically none of them accepted foreigners and/or students, or were even available for the time period we were looking at. Something that struck me as kind of odd was that She’d then reply with a list of options that did accept foreign students, but, we weren’t that impressed. The listings she provided would often not be in a location we were really excited about, be too far from the subway station, and/or be kind of overpriced for the size. I’d reiterate my parameters to her, and was beginning to realized we’d have to make some concessions probably, but it still felt like she was missing the mark with our requests. To be fair, we were also being a little difficult, because it was around this time (as referenced in the prequel post) that we were still figuring out where exactly in Tokyo we wanted to live.

We were broadening our search significantly and went back to the drawing board. I found some listings on websites outside of apts.jp, and one website included the real estate agency associated with the property with each listing as well. At this point I knew that inquiring about a specific listing I saw was a futile effort - I was really just trying to reach out to more agents to see if there was anyone better out there. I saw a listing with an agency whose name made me chuckle, called Balleggs, and I remember joking about it at the time with Miles (and Steven, who was still staying with us then). Well, it wasn’t much of a joke, because I’m pretty sure Balleggs was the only agency that got back to me (and very quickly too). I had a good feeling, so I sent our agent Ryo the same list of requirements we had been sending to other people, and he got back immediately with a list of apartments that actually fulfilled our requirements and seemed like placed we would live in for real. I got pretty excited, so decided to hard-pivot to only working with Ryo.

Another thing I learned about real estate agents is that because people are usually more available to view apartments on the weekends, they shift their schedule to working Thursday to Monday (and take Tuesday to Wednesday off). I was kind of hoping that between me and Miles, one of us is usually available at a given time during the weekdays (since he has morning class and I have afternoon class), we’d be able to knock out some weekday showings. Ryo insisted that we see the apartments together though, so we had to see them on the weekends as that’s generally when all three of us are available, which was a bit inconvenient for me because I had already scheduled trips during all my weekends. Eventually I conceded and agreed that finding an apartment was probably more important than traveling, so we blocked out the weekend of January 25-26 to go apartment hunting.

In the meantime, Miles started taking charge of the hunt and found that Suumo seemed to have the most comprehensive apartment listings and good filtering abilities + map. He sent Ryo a very long list of potentially suitable apartments. We showed up at the agency on the 25th where I met Ryo for the first time (Miles had chatted with him the weekend before, while I was out skiing :) thank u). He sat us down and had Miles’s list, plus some more apartments he found that also fulfilled our criteria. We then spent about 2 hours watching Ryo painstakingly look up each listing on his special realtor site which has the realtime status of the listing (e.g. available now, available at some date in the future, application in-progress, unavailable) and it was often different than the listings we could see on public sites. Ryo said public sites just don’t update nearly as quickly, so you really have to work with a real estate agent to filter properly. Typically apartments with a pending application will likely get accepted (he told us it would be <10% chance of it falling through, so probably best not to bother unless we absolutely loved a place), so he filtered all the options down to only apartments that are available now. (Apartments that are only available in the future currently have tenants, which means that we wouldn’t be able to see them, and what we soon learned is that if they weren’t available then, there is no way we would’ve been able to move in in a reasonable amount of time.)

After he filtered down all the apartments using his secret realtor site, he called every single listing’s management company to ask if they would accept foreign student applicants, and if we could view the apartment this weekend. That really knocked out a big chunk of the list. While Ryo was doing all of this, Miles and I were looking through the final filtered list of floor plans to determine which ones we would even remotely consider. We ended up with a list of 9 apartments (which we toured all of in 24 hours), and Ryo informed us that we should decide and apply ASAP after the viewing because the apartments might get snagged. He was not joking.

I imagine Ryo didn’t plan our tours intentionally to be this way, but the apartments quite literally went from worst to best. The first two apartments were quickly removed from consideration, but then the next 3 seemed to get better and better. We still had 4 apartments left to see by the end of Saturday, so we met up again on Sunday and saw the remaining set, and we ended up liking the last apartment we saw the best (which also happened to be the most expensive one…). We immediately told him our top choice after a short deliberation over lunch. He then followed-up, asking for a backup “just in case”, so Miles and I spent several hours not only determining our #2 choice, but ranking the next few just in case too. We actually went to a houseparty that day, and people were giving us their sympathies and warned us that we will likely continue to get rejected for various reasons. We were literally at the houseparty borrowing the hosts’ monitors trying to figure out how to rank the remaining apartments 😭 thank you Rich and Iris!

Ultimately, we decided on a top 5 and sent the list to Ryo Sunday evening. The next day, Ryo got back to us with the following status: our top choice had another simultaneous applicant, which was a Japanese family and almost certainly will get preferential treatment. Top choice was out. Our number two choice already had an applicant - we were too late to the game by inquiring Sunday night after it was definitely available Saturday night, so like I said, Ryo’s ASAP request was no joke. For our number three choice, despite Ryo filtering out apartments that would not accept foreign students, apparently the management company for this apartment said they wouldn’t accept two foreign students living together, which seemed like a total BS reason, but honestly still within realm of my expectations (i.e. getting rejected for a completely illogical random reason)*. So, we were down to 4 and 5 on the list, which we were actually pretty excited about at the time of visiting because it was so much better than the first two apartments we saw, but now that we had a taste of what could’ve been, I think it was hard for us to get as excited about it. There were definitely a decent amount of concessions we would have to make to live in those apartments, but I kept trying to look on the bright side - it was way more spacious and convenient than our current place, likely had adequate heating and a modern bathroom, etc. We started debating which one between 4 and 5 we liked more, because we kept flip-flopping on them too, discussing layouts and such.

*Side note: It was actually really nice working with Ryo, because not only did he take our requests and needs seriously, but he was also very open-minded and comfortable sharing details about how the whole real estate rental process worked, and as a result revealed a bit more about Japanese culture itself. He told us that management companies don’t like to rent to foreign students because many have had bad experiences with foreign students leaving Japan only after a few months, which makes sense - foreign students have the most tenuous living situation, and after getting to know my classmates, many don’t necessarily have the funds to keep living in Japan. They’re on a bit of a ticking time schedule - if they can’t get a job in a certain amount of time, they’ll have to go back to their home countries, and I’m sure paying rent and penalty fees would seem optional in a worst-case scenario (in addition to it just being annoying for the management companies). Since we were feeling pretty dismayed during the initial filter-out process, Miles asked Ryo if the management company’s concern was that we would leave or wouldn’t pay rent, would it assuage their concerns for us to pay a whole year’s rent up front (since we’re paying from our savings anyways)? I laughed at Miles’s suggestion at first since it seemed pretty ridiculous (I don’t know if we’d want to do that), but Ryo really took his question to heart, and said, “huh that is a good question, I don’t know. Let me ask my manager.” and he really did go ask! Ryo came back and explained to us that there are different tax implications for lump-sum vs monthly payments, so landlords don’t necessarily want that. Of course that reason has some fallacies, but we ultimately chalked it up to, Japanese people will follow processes over doing something that is more financially profitable. If there’s no precedent or process for something, even if it’s really advantageous for someone (the landlords in this case), it just can’t be done. There’s another interesting example of this that I’ll talk about in a bit.

Anyways, back to our now slightly disappointing, but still hopeful apartment hunting process. We actually decided we liked option 5 better (we nicknamed “pink floor” because well, it had pink floors, and Ryo had asked us if that was okay at the time. Apparently another thing that was undesirable about that apartment was that it was on the 3rd floor with no elevator. He said Japanese people simply won’t climb stairs, or live on the first floor. So apartments with either of those stats would end up being much cheaper relative to its square footage.) We asked Ryo to expedite the application process for pink floor, but after a few days, he gave me a call and asked me a puzzling question.

(stay tuned for part 3, coming tomorrow)