Has anyone had experience working with Open House as a realtor?
A sales guy grabbed me on the street and showed me a new build that looked decent but the aggressive sales nature of the guy I was speaking with was putting me off. Then a random expat guy shouted “don’t do it!” from the window of a passing BMW so made me more wary!
8 comments
Once you engage with these guys they will hound you for months. Don’t give them contact info. There are way better options.
They are pushy and the kids they send out to show you houses have very little shame. I had the boy showing me around try to sabotage my schedule for the day by insisting we go to look at further properties even though I said I had other commitments in the afternoon. He then spent 10 minutes on the phone with his boss while I waited in his car. I almost walked off but then he came back and still tried to push me to see another house even though I had already told him enough. I then shouted at him for a good minute about his poor attitude and told him to take me back to the station. He seemed completely unfazed by the experience which suggests to me it wasn’t the first time a customer got angry, or at least they train them to deal with bad reactions to the aggressive tactics.
Unrelated, openhouse just built 5 houses next to me. They look fine (I can’t say the houses are badly built) but during construction they damaged the asphalt on my land. It took forever to finally get them to commit to a concrete schedule to fix it including paying for a survey to fix the land boundary markers. They still haven’t given me the final certificate proving fault and remedial actions. I’ll have to remind the young guy in charge again.
The company has just been accused of encouraging buyers to take out residential loans and then turn the properties into income properties. This could lead to a larger crackdown on borrowers who rent out informally the properties they bought with a residential loan.
Sounds like they may have become more agressive over time.
I purchased/built a house through them 11 years ago. We had no problems. We purchased a lot in Setagaya through them and had the choice of having them build a house or with another builder. We used them for the house, and it all went smoothly. Sold the house for a profit 5 years later.
But we may have been lucky in who we dealt with inside the company.
you are better off elsewhere. that said, there are lots of lands in good areas which are owned by OH and they are pretty much the only realtor you can buy from.
If someone has to accost you on the street to hawk their expensive product, it’s not worth buying. You wouldn’t trust a car salesman doing the same thing and a house/apt costs many times more what a car does.
Very pushy and a bit shady. Went to meet with one and in the middle of the meeting the guy excused himself for about 10 minutes, comes back and says, “oh the price on the listing just went up and it’s 10k more.” I was like, “in the 10 mins we’ve been talking to you the price went up a thousand dollars a minute? So in 30 mins it’ll be up 30k?” He says “well we’ll be negotiating Soa ye we can come down.” Fine, whatever. We agree to go to the model home to examine finishes and a different salesman asks what are time frame to buy was. We already had an offer in on another place, but were still looking around, so we said, “we’re looking now to see what is available, so our timeframe is fluid.” The kid says are you putting in an offer today, we said, probably not. He said “oh. Excuse me.” He disappears and comes back 10 minutes later saying, “you’re not buying today. I have another appointment. Bye.”
Ended up buying a nice new development with an amazing saleswoman with Tokyu who did everything for us.
Anything being actively marketed to foreigners is going to be overpriced. They are doing it because the Japanese don’t want it at the price they are asking.
If someone approaches you on the street, never listen to their sales pitch or follow them.