Tl;dr
Do you recommend the real estate agency AtHearth? If not, who would you recommend?
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Hi everyone. I’ve been lurking on this subreddit for a while, but decided to finally create an account and post, because I’d like your opinions.
A bit of backstory. I’ve been living in Tokyo for about two and a half years now. When I first arrived in Japan, I lived in a small starter apartment/sharehouse, because honestly that’s all I could really get at the time. After about 6 months, I was notified that the building was to be torn down and I had to move out. Luckily, at that time I had a Japanese girlfriend who helped me get through the process of finding and renting a new apartment.
Now I need to move again due to a change in jobs, but here’s the problem. I no longer have aforementioned, now ex-girlfriend to help me, so I’ve been trying to go it on my own, but my Japanese is rather limited. I’ve reached out to agents on some of the big sites like Suumo, AtHome, etc., but they haven’t been very helpful, probably on account of my poor Japanese skills. They usually stop responding after exchanging a few pleasantries.
Meanwhile, I’ve also searched online for some English-speaking real estate agencies as well and have contacted them already. Most of them, like Plaza Homes and Ken Corporation, were kind of what I expected after reading a lot of the posts on this sub: pushing me to visit their office before they would share any apartments with me.
A couple of agencies were a bit more friendly and patient with me, and offered online meetings rather an an office visit, or even just to send me properties by email without having to sit through a consultation. One that stood out to me so far was AtHearth.
But before I get in too deep, I thought I should consult this sub and hear about your experiences with various agencies, the positives and negatives, which you recommend, etc. Also, AtHearth has already recommended some places to me that I’m actually interested in visiting, but before I do that, I just want to make sure that it would be worth my time to go and see these apartments. I’m just a little overly cautious and don’t want to get screwed over like some of the stories that I’ve read on this sub. Has anyone worked with them before and can share their insight? I’d really appreciate it.
2 comments
> pushing me to visit their office before they would share any apartments with me.
I think that’s standard across almost all agents. Think of it this way, why should they invest their resources in you when you aren’t willing to invest your time in them? Spending the time to go to their office and fill in forms means your more likely to stick with a single agent then use them once for a viewing and move on to another.
Edit: pushing you to choose one of the three apartments you see on the first day of which you don’t like any, **that** is a sign of a bad agent and unfortunately very common.
I used Living Japan before, highly recommended. We did a zoom call first where we went over what I was looking for, shared a few places on SUUMO back and forth, then met at the location to view some places. The only time I had to visit their office was to sign contracts and get the keys