Moving to Tokyo and finding an apartment
I recently moved to Tokyo from London
and I wanted to share the process of how we found an apartment in Tokyo.
We have an apartment now, but I think it took about 7 weeks to find.
I hope this video is helpful if you're moving to Japan some time, but if not I hope this is fun to watch anyway!
For a bit of backgroun, my husband has a job with a Japanese company and they helped us with the move.
They organised our estate agent meetings, but you can easily do this independently.
When meeting with the agent, they ask that you have a whole day free to discuss and visit potential apartments.
It's a very thorough process and we were asked many questions on the first meeting. It took about an hour.
Questions they asked were about our apartment preferences. Budget, location, work place, size, age of the building etc.
Then the agent uses a database (that is accessible to the public) to search for possible apartments.
And they print out everything that you might be interested in and we review the details.
The agent tries to find at least 3-4 that you would like to visit and once you've chosen, they phone to organise our visit.
In our case they also checked that they were open to renting to foreigners.
Our agent then drives us to the flats that we want or can view - this is a very difference experience to the UK (from my experience anyway!) but it made everything so easy.
Our agent does this because when we find an apartment with them and sign the contract we actually pay their fee - which is normally one month's rent.
But you only pay one agent/agency fees once you find an apartment. We were with several agencies because we wanted to view as many apartments as possible.
My husband and I viewed about 40 apartments in 7 weeks. And we viewed apartments all over Tokyo. But we mainly liked the Shinjuku and Shibuya areas.
We actually viewed a total of 47 apartments in 5 weeks. A couple of weeks ago we applied to an apartment and we signed the contract!
We are currently moving into the apartment and I'm vlogging the whole experience! It'll be fun to look back on in a few months!
Thank you so much for watching!