Hi all,
I’ve recently started working with RE agents in Japan to buy a house/land and I’m noticing some behavior that to me at least seems incredibly strange. I’ve talked to multiple agents so this isn’t an isolated incident and I’m hoping people here could help illuminate?
For example, why is it that agents really really want you to go to their office prior to showing you listings? I’ve bought a house before in the states and I only ever saw my agent during tours, so what is it with agents in Japan wanting to get you into their office so bad? One agent I talked to even told me he couldn’t show me a house because supposedly the seller said I hadn’t been to their office yet, but I don’t see why the seller would care?
Why do agents have secret listings not posted online? Again coming from the states, half the point of hiring an agent is to market your listing so you can ideally get multiple bids and/or a faster more favorable offer. But here it seems agents aren’t posting listings online so they can control who gets the commission? Is there another reason they do they do this? One agent mentioned this is one reason they wanted me to go into their office, to show me secret listings, but why don’t they just post it online then?
I know I’m generalizing but how can I align my priorities with the incentives agents have here? For example, it feels like some agents are hiding information for some reason – I asked one guy how it would work if I bought an old house and waited to rebuild after demoing since I heard you only pay interest on a loan here until you start reconstruction but this guy with 5 years experience said he never heard of this. Another time I asked an agent if I could rebuild an older house given the laws in Tokyo and he said yes, but when we toured it I saw it was attached to another house and asked how I could rebuild, and they said I could I would just need my neighbors permission…. But clearly no one’s going to put themselves into a situation where they’re dependent on neighbor approval so we were just wasting time.
So what gives? What incentives do agents have in Japan? Why do they hide listings? Do they not do inspections in Japan and that’s why agents are low key about deficiencies? Help.
14 comments
Wow, can help you here but it sounds quite odd how they operate. I imagine it’s extremely competitive so they will probably do and say anything to get your business. Certainly find another foreigner who has been through this and read the contract very, very thoroughly. Good luck!
*can’t* help you. Auto correct
> Why … agents really really want you to go to their office
Because once you’re there, you’re their’s. You can’t talk to another agent while you’re there, it’s hard to browse SUUMO, etc.
Think of them like dentists, once you’re in the chair, and the dentist suggests to fix that cavity they say they see, how likely are you to say “that’s enough, thank you for the info, now I’ll go to another dentist”?
Additionally, that’s how they operate: they can dig up a stack of papers (offers) to shove at you; agent can ask their fallow agents… Their office visit has never yielded anything passable in my experience.
> secret listings not posted online
They are not secret, rather, it’s a system that all agencies appear to use; My guess is, they pay for it, the system developer would go broke if it were free for all, online.
Additionally, they also have local listings, that is some elderly landlord who came to their office to leave a listing, or something. If a property is going out soon, why bother listing it online? And agencies want high turnover, they don’t care about best price for seller or buyer, they need to close fast.
If your agent is any good, they will happily send you scans of their secret listings by email. Don’t fall for the visit the office trap.
> what gives?
The commission is fixed (by law? by some unspoken agreement?). They will fleece some buyer or other, it needn’t be you.
> For example, why is it that agents really really want you to go to their office prior to showing you listings? I’ve bought a house before in the states and I only ever saw my agent during tours, so what is it with agents in Japan wanting to get you into their office so bad? One agent I talked to even told me he couldn’t show me a house because supposedly the seller said I hadn’t been to their office yet, but I don’t see why the seller would care?
A lot of them just attempt to gather as much of your personal information as they can.
You have to go into the office so they can get your fax number to fax you the secret listings. I wish I was joking
Yeah, that is a lot of time wasted. In my experience, it’s one of those things that are just done like that here. You need to register with the agent, so that’s min 45m of filling in forms at the office. Apart from getting all your personal information it’s a great opportunity to build a relationship and treat you to a nice bottle of complimentary water. And it’s more fun doing this tedious bit of admin in the air conditioned office maybe? They’ve probably done it like this since the early days of the shogunate.
My wife recently gave in and signed up with a local agency as they claimed they had ‘hidden’ properties. I said I didn’t think they did but she went ahead and submitted the web form. She was called instantly and asked to come in (which she doesn’t want to do). They did email a couple of crappy PDFs which I’d seen online anyway in more detail. They’ve called daily since asking her to come in. My advice is to arrange a couple of viewings with different agents, meet them at the property, avoid the office and choose the agent you like the most to stick with. That said we’ve been looking for 7 months with nothing we are remotely interested in coming up as yet.
I don’t know why the hide listings, so this is a guess.
Maybe they charge the seller for visibility – pay extra/more commission/whatever to advertise it online. Maybe some sellers aren’t in a rush to sell and don’t want to pay.
Or it’s a tactic to get you in the office.
We went in the other week with a list of wants and the agent was really helpful. He took us to two places – a new and a renovated place – so we could see what our money would get us. I wasn’t looking but nothing seemed odd.
The come to my office thing is normal. Secret list normal too.
Not knowing shit also normal.
>Why do agents have secret listings not posted online?
Because the MLS and the online listings at Suumo/Athome/homes/yahoo etc. are different. Agents have access to the MLS here. Some offices post listings online at search sites, some do not, it’s not connected like where you’re probably from.
>So what gives?
The same thing as everywhere, they’re paid on commission, this is how they sell a house (and make a commission).
>What incentives do agents have in Japan? Why do they hide listings?
Money. They get 3% from the seller and 3% from the buyer. They want to push listings that they represent both so they get 6%.
>Do they not do inspections in Japan and that’s why agents are low key about deficiencies?
Because they want to sell you a house not scare you away.
I am an American real estate agent in Shinjuku.
I want you to come to my office, not chat online. Here is why.
96% of listings are available to ALL real estate agents in Japan but only 70% of listings show up on sites like SUUMO, etc. Maybe 2% of listings are online but not available to real estate agents through the non-public MLS system. 20 percent of akiya are only available through akiya banks but 80 percent of akiya are not listed in akiya banks. A lot of information online has been copied and pasted by a human, and humans make errors or are selective about which information to share.
So it is to your benefit to use a real estate agent. You will see more listings and have better information than just surfing online.
Now here is the key point. All real estate agents have access to the same information, so it doesn’t really matter which agent you use. You can visit a fancy office with cute receptionists and rather wealthy agents who don’t really have to work that hard to make a living or you can support a smaller business where the agents have mouths to feed and thereby get better service.
The danger of course is that you will work with an agent very closely, take up weeks of their time and many many hours of their free labor, and then just walk next door and make a contract with a different agent. We want to meet you in person so that you will be less likely to betray us like that.
Some agents are really bad at searching for good properties so they just do nothing, let other agents do the search, then poach the customers with promises of “hidden unlisted properties.” What they don’t tell you is that the unlisted properties must be listed within a few days if the contract is an exclusive one. So all agents will eventually have most of the unlisted information Most truly unlisted properties are sold from company to company and cannot be bought by a regular person. Those are beyond your reach despite promises of “plentiful unlisted properties.”
Agents like to specialize in certain properties. My colleague is a specialist in investment worthy condos and I like detached houses with gardens. We each keep up-to-date on new listings and even visit every new listing to take photos, etc. in order to make better recommendations. Sometimes a rival real estate company full of lazy agents will contact us online pretending to be a customer in order to steal our recommendations for their clients. We want you to come to our office so we can check to make sure you are not an agent.
There is another reason you should visit us in person. If you want to take out a loan we will need a lot of personal information from you, information you may not even share with your spouse, etc. We have to know what kind of loan you qualify for BEFORE we start recommending properties, otherwise you will be wasting a lot of time. And we have contacts at banks we have worked with in the past who can give us up-to-date information on rapidly changing loan terms and help us shape your information into a successful loan application.
There are a lot of people who try to avoid real estate agents by searching for properties online, but when they do find something they cannot actually buy it because they have no clue how to apply for a residential loan. That is when they go online to get information from people who bought houses two years ago. But that advice is now completely useless. It is best to go to an agent first, stop by their office to establish trust and share your confidential information orally, not online. You will get recommendations tailored to your income and your preferences.
The “secret listings” come from a private system that only real estate agents have access to. I don’t know the details of this, but mere mortals don’t have access to it for some reason. I’m guessing there are hefty fees and a real estate license is required to get access, you know, typical Japan BS.
The listings you see on Suumo and other sites come from those listings, but are outdated. When you inquire about a listing in Suumo, the first thing a real estate agent does is to check in their private system to see if it’s still available.
Maybe someone that works in the industry can explain it better.
P.S. if you are buying from a developer, you don’t need an agent.
That saves the 3% commission, but you gotta read the contract carefully and, essentially, trust that specific developer.
We recently bought a house and really never had any of those issues. The first time we even went to the office was for doing the official we are buying this house, here is our 1 million yen deposit, lets review the contract, I”m ready to stamp everything with my hanko and no I am not part of the Yakuza.
Our real estate agent and loan officer came to the house we were renting, multiple times, for everything up to that point.