I’m (contractor, no housing allowance) moving to Okinawa to be with my wife (local) who’s there and we’ve both never apartment/ house hunted out there so we don’t know what to look for. We also have a medium sized dog. Any website recommendations or general recommendations? We’re preferably looking for a 1 br house in either Ginowan,Yomitan, Kadena areas.
by Lifetobemused
8 comments
With a medium sized dog renting an apartment will be really hard (almost impossible). It’s better to look for a house. Check out e-uchina, it’s the biggest site in Okinawa.
TotalOkinawa.com
They have a list of all housing agencies and you can check each one’s availability and filter by pets allowed and price.
Also there’s a FB group called “Okinawa Off Base Housing where you can post your max budget, # rooms wanted, pets, and a realtor will reach out to you with offers.
Tomiya housing down the street from the Futenma shrine is pretty good. Koza housing across from Plaza House is good too. I used Sunrise housing in Koza while we waited for our home renovations to be done. We also have have one large dog and one medium dog.
Check out e-uchina and goohome, especially if you have the advantage of speaking Japanese.
The dog, though, will make the pickings much slimmer.
Look online at Goohome and e-uchina, a lot of properties are cross listed between realtors, and anyway if a great house isn’t listed by a recommended realtor they won’t (be able to) help you get it.
If you’re wife is a local and speaks Japanese, I second everyone that says GooHome or E-Uchina. But if you look as a foreigner, they are automatically going to assume you make a million dollars, and charge you as such.
If by local you mean Japanese disregard the following.
As someone who just went through what you are about to, I can only say that it was pretty annoying. I went into places that offered Japanese pricing and some only wanted to rent me the places with jacked up prices and others would only rent to me with a japanese person as an emergency contact.
BTW, the places that wanted the emergency contact were requiring the emergency contact to sign a form saying that they would be responsible for me and all that jazz. Basically the signer was acting as a guaranter while they were still charging me for one.
My advice is to do one of the following. See if your company can assist you with housing, take the hit in the wallet and pay military prices, or go I to any housing agency and specifically ask for Japanese priced houses. Be very clear on Japanese priced places or they will try to show you military priced ones. There will be some places that may not need you to have a local person sign for you and will be okay with a private guaranter company. Good luck!
Maybe let her do the house hunting separately and agree on the price. She might get it at a much better rate. I had a place where I was charged ¥100,000 a month. My now wife said she probably would have been able to get it for ¥60,000. I was told by many Okinawian friends that I was paying too much. It’s worth a chance.. let her go look, and then you make a separate appointment. See if you get the same price. It might have just been the company that I went through.. GOOD LUCK.