apartment hunt pt 3

Previous post here

Some more context about renting apartments in Japan: there are a lot of upfront fees. They include:

• - Key money fee, typically one month of rent. This is just money gone down the drain, and is described as a “gift to your landlord” for letting you rent the place. Apartments are slowly getting rid of this requirement, and Ryo said that’s especially true for the less attractive ones (basically the equivalent to a “one month off rent” deal, except…just getting rid of an extraneous fee)
• - Guarantor company fee, typically one month of rent. Originally, I thought guarantors were just Japanese people (and if you don’t know any Japanese people, you can pay a company to do this instead) willing to vouch for you, like a high school counselor’s college recommendation letter. But Ryo explained that guarantors are actually more like landlord insurance - if you cannot pay rent, the guarantors will to cover the cost. He said that some (more outdated) apartments may require both a guarantor company and a guarantor person, but luckily these days most only require just the guarantor company. Hopefully the guarantor company requirement also goes away over time, but we’ll see…
• - Deposit, typically 1 to 2 months of rent. Self-explanatory, but I’ve heard that if you break the lease early (leases are typically 2-3 years), the landlord may not give your deposit back. Scary.
• - Agency fee, typically 1 month of rent. Since we’re working with a realtor agency (unless you know a landlord personally, this is pretty much the default), they get a cut for finding the place. Well, at least we like Ryo, but it’s a pretty steep fee.
• - Various smaller fees, such as fire insurance (this also covers burglary and accident insurance, so considering that, it’s pretty cheap), 24hr maintenance support, admin fee (this was not thoroughly explained to me, Ryo said that printing documents costs money, but like, not that much…), etc.

Anyways, all of these fees need to be paid upfront, which means whatever amount you see for the monthly price, multiply that by 4-5 to get your initial bill. It’s actually insane, and I’m so glad we are going off of savings and not a fixed monthly income with no prior savings, because otherwise, I’m pretty sure you’d need to take a loan in order to just live somewhere in Japan.

So when Ryo called me a week after our big apartment tour, he explained the situation: for our first place choice, the other applicants (who, as a reminder, are Japanese) agreed to pay 1x month rent key money, whereas when we applied, we only agreed to pay 0.5x rent key money (which was as advertised by the management company/realtor initially, it’s not like we had an active choice in this). Ryo asked me if we were willing to pay 1x month rent key money to be competitive with the Japanese family. I was very confused because I thought we were already out of the running for this apartment. I had the following 3 thoughts: 1. if we don’t get the apartment, which seemed to be the most likely scenario, I don’t have to pay the extra 0.5x rent key money, so there’s little consequence to saying yes. 2. if we do get the apartment, I mean that’s great - it is our first choice apartment after all, and I guess the extra 0.5x month rent seems worth it at that point to not have to do more searching and/or make serious concessions about our living situation. And finally, 3. the most uncharitable of the thoughts: …what if there is no competing Japanese family after all, and the management company is just saying this to get us to pay more upfront fees since they know they can bully us because we’re foreigners? Unfortunately, the reality is that we are foreigners and they can definitely bully us, so, I agreed (with low expectations that this would change the outcome, of course).

A few days later, he messaged me saying that to everyone’s (including his) surprise, our first choice place said they preferred us over the other applicants. I was elated to hear the news, but also because of the suspicious nature of all of this, we were still on guard. Ryo said that either the management company and/or guarantor company will give me a call over the next few days to ask me some screening questions. I did hear other expats talk about this and I had read about it on the internet too - my impression was that it was a combination of making sure you could speak Japanese, and ask some clarifying questions about your situation. I was sure they were going to have some follow-up questions about our financial situation, since we don’t have any income on paper, and as foreign students, we were probably in the highest financial and tenancy risk group. I asked Ryo if the conversation was going to be in Japanese, and he said yes, which I started panicking about, because while I could probably talk about (some of) my hobbies with the competency of a 1-year-old, I don’t think I quite had the Japanese language abilities to explain my complicated financial situation. Ryo didn’t really elaborate, so I resorted to practicing with ChatGPT, asking it to pretend to be an apartment management company and ask me questions in Japanese. I felt so silly studying this fabricated script that I didn’t even know if it was relevant, but I knew I was going to beat myself up in the future if I failed the screen at this point.

Another week went by with my eyes constantly glued on my phone screen, anxious about missing the call, trying to rehearse phrases in my head. No call. I messaged Ryo, “yo what’s going on” (ok not literally but effectively so), and he was like, “🤷 they’re really dragging their feet huh…seems like they might not be interested after all. Would you like to look at more apartments or should we try to apply to the other place again (pink floor)?” This was Feb 6, and based on my original envisioned timeline, we should’ve signed an apartment and hopefully already begun the move-in process by now. I was worried, not only because of the delayed timeline relative to our temporary spot, but that the apartments we had viewed weeks ago might’ve been snagged by now, so we’d have to restart the whole process again, which seems like it would be at least several weeks long with an unlimited upper bound. We concluded that if pink floor hasn’t been taken by this point, we better snag it soon, otherwise we might have to move into another temporary place which would both be expensive and a total pain.

The next day, Ryo told us that we indeed passed the screening for the first choice place!! I was even more surprised by this news, since I had no idea how a Japanese company would be able to determine my financial situation - I had no Japanese bank account or assets at the time. In all honesty, I think all I sent was a screenshot of my bank account (not even, it was a screenshot of my investment app homepage since most of my money is not sitting in my bank’s savings account), which seemed so easy to fake. Anyways, again, not questioning any decisions here - I immediately said yes to Ryo. He said that the earliest move-in date would be Feb 20, which was a lot later than we were hoping for…the last date of our current place is Feb 22, so that only gives us 2 days (probably less) to move. We asked why we wouldn’t be able to move in earlier, and he said that they need to clean the place. Remember, we viewed the apartment on January 26 (and boy, was it really not clean then - the previous tenant was almost certainly a foreigner. I kind of get the foreigner hate tbh) - which means it took the management company almost (probably more) than a month to schedule an apartment cleaning? Normally, I would’ve chalked it up to management company incompetence, but actually I remembered conversations I had with not just Ryo, but the other realtor that I worked with initially, where I inquired about a few apartments where the current tenants’ last day was scheduled to be mid February, but they warned me that we probably wouldn’t be able to move in for at least another month. This was a super confusing concept because I feel like in the US, landlords would be so happy to minimize vacancy time, and losing up to a months’ rent trying to schedule a cleaning just didn’t seem right - I mean, that cleaning could cost up to a month’s rent and be worth it, basically. Miles and I were willing to pay more money to the management company to let us move into this surely vacant apartment earlier, and they said no. So, there was our other experience with Japanese process over capitalism…

Ryo gave us the estimate for the initial costs, and gee, it was even more than I had initially calculated mentally. For full transparency, we ended up renting an apartment for ¥325k per month, which is $2140 (or $1070 per person) for a 2-bed 1-bath, or in Japan, it’s known as a 2LDK (2-bedroom + living/dining/kitchen room). It’s 62m2 (667 ft2), coming out to $3.2/sqft, which is comparable to SF prices (actually from a quick Google search, it’s about twice as good as SF prices, which checks out because it’s about half of what we were paying in SF). Again, this was by far the nicest, most luxury, and expensive apartment we viewed - so with a bit of compromising (location, size, furnishing) rent in Tokyo can be even more affordable (well, relative to one of the most expensive cities in the US). So the initial costs should be about 4x, or $8k, right? It came out to over $10k! Again, grateful that we had some savings, because that is a pretty hefty price to pay if you were only budgeting for $2k per month. He requested payment through Japanese bank wire, which…I did not have. I immediately tried to open a Japanese bank account, which I believe you can only do through Japan Post Bank if you have only lived in the country for less than 6 months. Luckily, Japan Post Bank has a very well-designed app (Japanese websites are known for terrible UX, so was expecting the worst here), so I was able to apply without even leaving my bed. Unfortunately, they said the approval and bank opening process may take up to 2 weeks, which meant I wouldn’t be able to get the bank account, let alone transfer my funds in time to make the payment for the apartment (in case anyone was wondering, it can take a really long time to transfer money internationally, so don’t wait until the last minute to conduct large international transactions). I was able to pay the management company via credit card, but Ryo asked for the agency fee and insurance in cash…luckily we exchanged a bunch of cash before coming to Japan because I remembered it being kind of annoying to withdraw from ATMs in Japan (and there would often be a withdrawal fee of some sort) from past trips, but uh, that wad of cash is a lot smaller now. I’ve got to say, I would feel so weird carrying that much cash on me in almost any other country, so, that’s another major Japan plus point.

One more thing Ryo asked for was my Hanko, or a personal seal/stamp. Prior to coming to Japan, several of my friends asked me if I was going to get one, and I thought at the time, “there’s no way I’ll need one, surely they’re only for official business purposes and I won’t be doing anything that serious while I’m here. I might get one just for the novelty, though.” I guess renting an apartment qualifies as serious official business. They’re pretty easy to get made, you can order them online, or get one made in 10 minutes at a Donki (short for Don Quijote, a hilarious name for a Japanese department store. The closest analogy I can think of right now is Wal-Mart, but it’s still kind of different). I was worried that getting it made at Donki wouldn’t be “official” enough (just a touristy gimmick), so I went to a specialty Hanko shop and ordered one. I kind of wanted to get one with my name in Chinese, but Ryo insisted that it needed to have my last name in furigana (spelled out in Japanese sounds, essentially writing “Huang” vs 黄, or in this case, it had to say “フアン” (fuan), which was even worse than “Huang” in my opinion). It was kind of ugly, but, whatever - I’m seriously considering getting another one in Chinese. It was cool to go to a proper Hankoya (Hanko store) though. It was pretty funny - when we showed up with all the stuff to sign the paperwork, even Ryo looked at my Hanko and said, “sorry you had to go and buy one, this is another old Japanese tradition - normally signature should be okay. Actually, I could just go to Donki and make one with your last name, so this is kind of dumb, ne?” (his words, not mine :))

one step closer to being japanese

Miles stamping the paperwork using my Hanko, prompting the “hmm hankos are kind of dumb, huh” comment

Well, we successfully signed our paperwork and paid all the fees on Feb 16, so just waiting 2 more days to move into our new apartment! Still have to pick up the keys and register my bank account and buy furniture and appliances (Japanese apartments don’t come with any appliances - no washing machine, refrigerator, etc., and it’s going to be a challenge to get the appliances into the apartment when we do get around to purchasing them, but that’s a problem for another day). Anyways, this was one giant stressful checkbox that we’ll get to check off soon, so I’m really excited to close this chapter finally. Will of course do an apartment tour after moving in!