Does anyone have experience with building your own house in Japan?
Obviously I have never bought a house in my life, so I’m a bit confused. I looked through suumo briefly and it doesn’t seem that ready-made houses are suitable for us, so I’m thinking to go for 注文住宅, especially that we want ZEH or near-ZEH, proper insulation, etc.
I’m not sure where to start – whether I should go directly to house-building companies or to a real estate agent first, since I will also need to buy land (and all the help necessary to do it) and somehow consolidate both the house and land into a mortgage. Much appreciated if anyone has any suggestions or good resources to share on how to approach this.
3 comments
The plot of land you would have to go to a real estate agency to find one. As for the the pre-built house, you can go to the company separately, i.e. Daiwa House, etc, but sometimes real estate agents also have a lot of information on pre-built houses. Usually these prebuilt house companies will work with a real estate agency you have in mind.
Pre-built houses usually have some customization options. Wall insulation, like counter tops, window locations, number of outlets usually are not too difficult, since they don’t change the floorplan or the structural engineering so that it would require city approval. (This is more of an issue if you want a totally custom house designed from ground up).
The only other challenge is that building a chyumon jyutaku + on land does tend to be more expensive and it takes a bit of careful planning if you don’t want to end up at too much of a financial loss (if it concerns you). For example, you probably won’t want to build an expensive 50M Toyota Home chumonjyutaku on a 10M plot of land and expect your home to be worth 60M when neighboring houses are only worth 25-35M.
I’ve had a house built in Tokyo.
First, we went to a model house showroom estate. There were a dozen or so house building companies. We walked around most of them, and sat down and had the sales pitch with a few of them we liked. In the end we didn’t go with any of them, as none of them had plots of land in areas that we were interested in. (I’m only mentioning it in this story as it might be a useful route for you).
Fortuitously, we found a nice plot of land with a local estate agency. We bought the plot, and the estate agent introduced us to a local architect/house building company. We had the sales pitch with them and liked their show house (and the other houses that they’d built in the area), so we signed a deal with them.
It took about a year, all told, from our first meeting to the finished product. We were able to customise everything. Lots of times they had ‘preferred’ companies they would work with for things like kitchens or bathrooms, but even so we had the freedom to go with other makers if we wanted to.
I don’t know if any of that waffle answered your questions, so feel free to ask here or DM me if you like.
There are a lot of information in r/japanfinance wiki about owning/building a house, specifically this page: https://www.reddit.com/r/JapanFinance/wiki/index/spending/real-estate/
If you’re looking for ZEH house, this thread has a lot of good information: https://redd.it/wci2s3
I’m currently looking to build a house as well.
My situation: Wife fall in love with Ichijo (一条工務店) while I’m trying to find another builder with the same quality as Ichijo but with cheaper cost.
We went to Ichijo open house few weeks ago, the salesman said that for i-smart lineup 100ishm2 (30ish tsubo) would cost 30 million even though the price per tsubo is 700,000yen. So real cost could be listed per tsubo price + 200,000-300,000 yen
As for the question whether to go to house builder or real estate agent first, from what I can understand:
– house builder (Ichijo) can help with finding a land, but real estate agent might have better database about unlisted land from public website such as suumo
– However, Ichijo mentioned that they have better understanding of the land so we can avoid paying extra work+cost on top of paying the land (e.g. Land that needs to be harden(I don’t know the English term), or if the land is actually higher than the street, the stone wall that hold the land can be out of date and needs to be repaired)