Tokyo house

Buying a house in Tokyo

We have been thinking about buying our own place for a while, just wasn't sure where. It could be when we move back to New Zealand, or, perhaps some other country (a few offers have popped up), and maybe Tokyo itself. We have lived in an apartment in Tokyo for about 13 years, and that has been great. But it would be nice if it was *ours*.

I have been keeping an eye out on the realestate home pages, just to see what is available. We were looking for something around 4LDK, so that the boys can have separate rooms. A stand-alone house would of course be very nice, but also checked a few apartments and mansions. (Japanese mansions are not mansions!)

In March 2015 we asked to see a couple of houses, one in particular stood out to us. I had seen it on the market for a while (over a year at least), it is 131m^2 land, and 220m^s inside, so you know it is expensive! Quite a bit outside our budget, maybe if it was half price! It was full of furniture and garbage, apparently the previous owner had not managed to keep up with the payments, and the bank foreclosed. But that is an interesting thing, almost all places we looked at to buy, where "not clean". "Would it have killed you guys to at least vacuum?". That is talking about the places that were empty. It seems the Japanese always "remodel" after they move in, so cleaning isn't paramount?

One interesting thing that popped up when discussing the financials of the very expensive place, they mentioned the realtors fee, and the fee to the bank, and then "you will need to give a couple of million gift to the previous owner". Wait, what? Clearly I feel for the previous owner, but that is peculiar? I, the buyer, have to give a gift of money, to the guy who could not pay his mortgage and it was foreclosed? Clearly, I know nothing about realestate.

It is also common for the realestate staff to want to pick us up in a car, to take us to the property, even if it is just in our area. I understand that the "customer is king" is important, and so that is part of the service. But sometimes, it was much more convenient for us to cycle over to the property. I also found I enjoyed the challenge of finding the Internet listed properties in an area, by just going on the image and other clues. Good way to get out in the weekends. We were quite lucky that the realtor had someone who spoke in English with us, this was a great relief.

After seeing a (incredibly cluttered) house, which apparently had to pay a fine every month for being over-sized, the realtor popped in to show a bit of land on the way back home...

The land

We had not really thought about looking at land at all, so initially I was not really looking seriously at it. But it had some interesting potential. Off the main road, still near the Odakyu line (as we are already used to), in the same area so the school does not change. Corner lot. Had the typical blue tarp covering it of course, this is Japan after all. 87m^2 land for ~60M yen. This is shibuya-ku so, yeah, expensive.

[land picture]

One thing that is interesting is the new rule about have 4m access road to new houses. (For emergency vehicles). Since the road to this lot (or rather, the house that used to stand there) does not, there is a 2m "setback" on the land where you are not allowed to build. You own the land, but can't place any permanent buildings on the part which is for the 4m access road. So, it feels like you are buying 68m^2 for ~60M yen.

But not really. In Japan, the land comes with two percentages. With this land, it is 60% and 300%. This means that you can build (foot print) on 60% of your land area, which is from the original 87m^2! Ie, about ~54m^2 can occupy the land area. Which is smaller than the 68m^2 with setback. So it is more about where on the land you place your building, in our case, toward the west corner (bottom left on the image). This leaves the setback area for parking our bikes and similar.

The second number, 300%, is the total size you are allowed to build. Ie, when adding floors. As it happens, 3 floors at about 54m^2 is only about half that, so that has not yet been an issue. There is also a sunlight rule, but I'll bring that up later.

When talking financials with the realtor, they explained that if I got an average mortgage for the 60M yen land, the monthly payment would be about 16man yen. (160,000) But, while there is no house on the land, you can pay just the interest on the mortgage, about 4.6man a month. Until the day you move in. You get a second "part" to the mortgage that pays for the house building, and start paying the full amount once you move in. So the system is not completely against you, if you consider buying land and building.

Design

I looked around for a way to design a house, and there are many on the Internet. Some for browsers, from free apps, others to buy etc. But the foreign tools did not really work out. It became clear that I needed to use a Japanese made design program, to get the "standard" sizes of things, like the set bathrooms, stairs, genkan, and all that. Clearly there is a monopoly going on here, as it seems there is just one software, and it was quite expensive for my hobby level interests. So I went a bit more oldskool, and started measuring things at home to get an idea of how much space are needed. Typical Japanese apartment bath/shower room seems to fit in 2m x 2m, and so on.

Eventually, I sent a sketch to the realtor that I had made of what I thought could work on the land we were looking at.

[my design image]

A couple of days later