Thursday, September 9, 2010

Buying a house in Japan Part 7 - The Decision!

I know that I'm not keeping up this great series very regular, so just go here to get the recap and your bearings on where we are in our house buying endeavours!

After several months of scanning the Internet and going to check out houses, we finally managed to find a house that looked basically perfect. One of our biggest requirements, and also hurdle, was our wish to have a decent sized living room where we could fit in a nice big corner sofa and also have some room for the baby to play in. Most of the houses we saw were of decent size in terms of sqm, but usually had a quite small living room (~15-20sqm or so perhaps).

Before we went to see the place we had quite high hopes since we had seen the layout, knew the location, price and all of it seemed to meet our initial requirements, so the deal breaker would be if the distance to the train station would be misleading in the papers or that the designer had been drunk when choosing the color schemes etc. in the house.

As we met up with the in-laws, who joined in for support, and discussed our strategy, we decided to use English as much as possible when expressing our opinions on stuff to not give away too much to the sales rep (who we correctly assumed wouldn't be able to understand English). This was probably good in theory, but practically completely unnecessary since even a deaf sales rep would be able to read our reactions as we enthusiastically checked out the place and found it to be basically perfect and what we had been looking for since several months back and almost given up on.

After seeing the house and sat down with the rep, we quite quickly made it clear that we wanted the house (note to self; next time buying a house, trying to negotiate price before saying "it's great, we want it!" might give a stronger position for negotiations). For obvious reasons, the rep was more than happy to sell us the house, but also needed to get things put in motion for the huge loan that we needed to take, as well as a down payment of 1 million Yen (~$10K USD) in cash within a few days... The down payment we could scavenge up without too much effort.

Coming up next; the LOAN

10 comments:

David said...

"who we correctly assumed wouldn't be able to understand Japanese"

Did you mean "English"?

Unknown said...

aha! you saw David's comment and fixed it!

Mr. Salaryman said...

Yep David and Michelle - that's what happened!
Thank you David

Anonymous said...

ehh, i think one million is about 10K, not a 100K.

I wish it was 100K though.....hmm....

Evacomics said...

Is it 10 million yen!?
I also get confused with the millions and 万 conversions all the time...

Mr. Salaryman said...

Ooops! Yep, it should be 10K USD and not 100, thanks for keeping a watchful eye out!

Changed it in the post now to reduce confusion for our future generations!

East Hampton Real Estate said...

Great! Japan is a very beautiful place. It is a good thing you already found your home after a lot of checking. Finding the best house is really hard especially if you are looking for specific details.

Gold Coast Real Estate said...

After you have determined the best location for you, the next important factor to check when buying a house in a development project, is to check out the reputation of the builder or developer.

Gold Coast Real Estate said...

After you have determined the best location for you, the next important factor to check when buying a house in a development project, is to check out the reputation of the builder or developer.

christopher Pia said...

This is an interesting article. Im not sure how I came across a real estate article, but interesting read.

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