Buying a house in Tokyo - the fun and games involved

Herroo......
Yep - am still alive and well but the past few months have been rather packed which is why I have not updated my blogg. Since we last spoke I have been to China for another biz trip, went house hunting, bought a house, left Amazon and am in the middle of switching from Windows to Mac for my main machine. As I write this entry, I just happen to also be in the middle of a long grueling flight to the UK - Virgin Airlines - nice presentation but the seats have just about enough room to swing a cat - another 4 hours to go before we land...
After an amazing 3.5 years at Amazon.com, I finally graduate to venture on to do something closer to what I eventually want to do with my life - work for myself. Until that happens, I am working with a good friend of mine as Director of IT and Operations in a small pharmaceutical company in Tokyo. I will be managing all technical and operational aspects. It's a great opportunity where I will gain the experience that I need to run my own operations in Japan and at the same time build a website and services which will leave this company as the leading internet technology enabled pharmaceutical company in Japan. Some of you already know of my plans in the future and the brand "Danny Choo" but for those who don't - keep those mince pies peeled :-)
As for the other stuff - moving house, making the switch etc - find out more in an entry nearby.

As I mentioned in a previous post, we just bought a house in Tokyo! (pictured above) No more living with noisy bastards next door, noisy brats running around upstairs, no more noise emitted by humans! Why? because we went for the detached type. I have been through and had enough of living with any form of life next door. I just cant stand human generated noise. Besides that, there is a lot of good out of buying your own free standing property.
For a start, you own the land and if you need to knock down your house in the future to build a new one - its going to be easy because there is nothing attached. Another point is that if I chose an apartment, the price would drop by 10,000,000 yen on the day I receive the keys! I am just over the moon now that my wife and I have a place of our own - free to drill holes anywhere, free to put up shelves, free to install a 100MB optic fibre internet connection without having to ask some idiot of a landlord (te he he - tell you more about that in a diff post) and pretty much free to do anything including installing motion detector sensors!
There is however all the hassle of applying for a loan and the zillion documents involved in the whole house buying process is just overwhelming.
If you are a foreigner in Japan - on a working permit and don't have a Japanese spouse, then you will be glad to know that you can get a mortgage with Tokyo Mitsubishi Bank. Go to any other bank, and they will look at you as if you just escaped from some mental asylum. Tokyo Mitsubishi Bank do have some hefty conditions though - number of years of employment, level of income - and you have to have a seal - not the mammal (although I have a plush toy of a seal which they did not accept) but the type which you smear with red ink and stamp all over the place - do a Google for INKAN and look at the images to see what one looks like.
Being of Chinese descent, I have a Chinese name and just happen to have made a seal when I was in China but always treated it as a toy - which I ended up registering at the local ward office because I just could not be bothered to invest the time to make a real one!

We started of by looking for properties on the net and at the same time we were going round tokyo looking at different areas - scoping out the local shops, transportation and people - east Tokyo was a bit scary for my liking. We have always lived in the west and we ended up there too - but the prices of land is significantly higher. The physical property is pretty much the same anywhere you go in Tokyo - should be able to build a decent house for 15,000,000 yen. The price of the land is where the big difference is and the Jonan and Josai areas in west Tokyo can be anywhere from double to triple the price over East Tokyo for the same size of land.
Anyway, after applying to see some properties, the creepy estate agent contacted us and we arranged to meet. When we met him, he handed us some floor plans which you can see above - shows plans of all floors, and all the other bits and pieces that you need to know. We saw about 6 properties in total but ended up buying the first one that we went to see - its in a fantastic area - and we can easily get to Akihabara (very important :-) and work within 30 min's and its easy to get to Narita airport (which we end up using quite a bit).
When looking at these plans, watch out for a few things before agreeing to visit as all you will end up doing is wasting your time. In our case, I wanted somewhere quiet - so no main roads nearby. Somewhere relatively close to the station - ours ended up being 4 min's away :-) Local amenities is another thing that you want to look out for - you could end up with a sad Shotengai (shopping street/arcade) like the one we used to have at Higashi Fushimi with only a handful of shops or in our case just happen to have Musashikoyama Shotengai which has a million and one shops.

Mr creepy crawly (estate agent) then takes us around Tokyo to look at the properties - we decided to buy a new house rather than a piece of land and then designing our own house (which is quite typical) for a few reasons - one is that we are still down and out and cant afford it and another (main reason) is that it would take about 6 months to build the house - and I just could not wait that long. The offerings range from bog standard Japanese house to very bog standard Japanese house like the ones you see above. These houses were just completed in Mitaka-shi Tokyo - a not bad neighborhood but it was in the middle of nowhere and has a huge electrical pylon in the middle of this complex. We did not really want a second hand house but if you are looking for a used house then be aware that you may get a bad interest rate when taking out a loan. The interest rate in Japan is very low - we got our mortgage at 0.95% interest rate for the first 3 years and then 2.75% for the remaining X years.

About 30 days after we decided to buy our new place - 30 days of paperwork, 30 days of running back and forth between the bank and ward office - we finally got the keys. Pic above shows our place at Tamagawa emptied out.

We chose Ari-san Ma-ku as the moving company - fantastic prices and service - its the second time we used them. Many houses in Tokyo come with small staircases and in most cases a crane is needed to lift your fridge to the second floor. A crane will cost you extra but what Ari-san does is to lift the fridge, bed and other large objects to the top of the truck which you see above and then they pass it over to the second floor balcony - no extra charge for a crane and very interesting to watch at the same time.

OK, here are some shots of what our place looks like on the inside - Above shows our living area. The Mac Mini is our media center and is also part of our network too which means lazing in front of the plasma browsing sites is becoming a bit of a past time. Was my first time to use Bluetooth keyboards and mice - I was very surprised at the reception range.

One of the great things about having your own place is that you can put up shelves and wot not without having to ask anybody. Landlords forbid that you make any sort of hole in the wall or they will just end up charging you an arm and a leg (and maybe a torso too) - you can alternatively try to fill up the holes with toothpaste and hope that the landlord does not spot it on your moving out inspection. Anyway, how do you like my 'Shelf-O-Gundams' ? Some of you may know about the Fix Figuration series of Gundam figures by Bandai - I have a handful here but have refrained from buying them all - the problem with the Fix series is that some of the Gundams have parts which fall of easily - try to read a review at Amazon.co.jp before buying.

Above: Dining area - small but cozy.

Above: Kitchen area

This is the computing room otherwise known as 'Sky' - our bedroom is 'Sun', the living/kitchen is 'Earth' and the room on the first floor is 'Moon' - each room is color coordinated to match the name of the room too - well its something to do I suppose. Sky does not usually look like this but I took this shot during the switch from Windows to Mac - on top of that, its a week after I left Amazon, a week before I go to the UK and a week during the FTTH optic fibre installation - meaning that this room looking like seven shades of poop is quite normal given the circumstances.

The thing about Japanese houses is that everything is made of wood - I went to buy an electric drill but I have not used it yet because you can easily drive nails through the wall without it. In the UK everything is brick meaning that you can pop your plasma on the wall with no trouble - try that in a Japanese house and the whole wall will probably collapse. Our house is freezing cold in the winter and will probably be blazing hot in the summer. But this is only our first house and I really don't mind putting up with the extremes just as long as we have our air conditioning and heaters - beats living next to noisy freaky humans.