I’ve been living around Tokyo for the past eight years, moved a few times, and the experience has been always awful: the agents I’ve dealt with have been consistently pushy and borderline dishonest – now that I am considering moving once more, I dread having to deal with them again.
So far, my approach has been to look for properties in Suumo/Homes and contact the agents listed for the properties I was interested in, which doesn’t seem to work well.
What is a better way to go about this? Should I try to find an English-speaking agent catering to foreigners even though I can speak Japanese?
2 comments
>So far, my approach has been to look for properties in Suumo/Homes and contact the agents listed for the properties I was interested in, which doesn’t seem to work well.
I look at various sites like iiHeya.net, Suumo, and Homes, taking note of the bukken numbers and property names. Then, absent a company I have a good relationship with, I look for an independent realtor who has advertising materials up for those companies but isn’t specifically under any one company. Then I tell them the bukken I like and why I like them. If they get what I’m after and can get me into view one of those apartments or recommend an alternative, great. If they waste my time showing me garbage places just because I’m foreign, I thank them and walk away. Life’s to short to waste on a business that won’t listen to you.
>Should I try to find an English-speaking agent catering to foreigners even though I can speak Japanese?
You have to follow your gut there and to a degree it will depend on your market, but my experience in Tokyo has been that your agent can’t control if a landlord refuses to rent to foreigners, but a good one will absolutely be proactive and honest with you to figure out what you want and make you happy enough to close the deal. They want the commission! I figure an English-speaking realtor is usually charging foreigners a premium assuming their clients have no choice but to go with them. My opinion is that anyone with the patience to stammer through the business even in broken Japanese is better off trying, if for no other reason than to preserve the “I can always go with any of the 100s of other realtors in town if you do me rotten” factor.
Suumo and Homes are somewhat downstream from the official listings because they rely on agents who must first call up another agent (who represents the landlord) to ask permission to list the property on Suumo or Homes, then upload all the information and photos to the sites. By the time the property makes it online, it may already be booked.
It takes time for booked properties to be taken down as well (which only happens when another telephone call is made to confirm availability), giving the illusion that certain good properties are (still) available on Suumo or Homes but nowhere else. There is no hurry to update old listings.
The sites also have a few exclusive properties only available online, reinforcing the appearance that certain amazing properties are out there in the market. Some listings seem too good to be true, and when you contact them you may not get a response.
If you then go directly to a physical real estate agency, and if the agent who works there does not have the patience to work with a foreign client, he or she may try to quickly pass you on to an easy to obtain, high commission, low quality property (= a trap for foreigners). They will have a list of these “low initial fees” junk apartments ready to go in case you walk in their door.
However, some good agents (especially English speaking ones) will show you ALL available properties only IF YOU VISIT THEIR OFFICE in person. They will walk you through the process, calling up every single property to check availability in front of you. These more persistent agents will seem to have poorer quality properties on average when compared to the listing you saw on Suumo and Homes because these agents are showing you what you can actually obtain with your salary, visa status and ability to pay initial fees. When confronted with this reality, many people blame the agent rather than adjust their expectations and/or budget.
If you trust that agent to continue to search in your behalf, they will eventually get lucky, find you a good property the moment it comes on the market, show it to you immediately and quickly get an application In before it makes it to Suumo or Homes. It may take weeks for this to happen.