Chapter 13 — Taking the first step

The people who never buy

We meet a lot of people who have been thinking about buying property in Japan for three years.

They are not undecided in any ordinary sense. They know the neighbourhoods. They can tell you what a machiya costs in Nishijin. They have opinions about Kanazawa versus Matsumoto. They have been reading about this for longer than most owners spent buying.

And they have not made an offer, not once, and often have not sent an enquiry.

If that description makes you uncomfortable, this chapter is the one that matters.

Why people stay stuck

Five reasons, and none of them are laziness.

Everything is in a language you cannot read. Reasonable. Also solvable, and Chapter 4 solved it.

You do not know whether you can actually do this. Whether you can buy without a visa, whether you can get a mortgage, whether the rules will change. Chapters 1, 3 and 10.

You do not know who to ask. Your enquiries went unanswered, which you reasonably read as a closed door. Chapter 5.

You are afraid of an expensive mistake. Also reasonable — Chapter 12 lists the ways it goes wrong. But notice what that chapter actually concluded: the buyers who get hurt are the ones who did not know there was anything to check.

And the fifth, which nobody admits to: you are not ready.

That one deserves the rest of this section.

Not ready is different from not decided

If an offer is accepted, the house can be yours in a matter of weeks. In that time you will have to send a very large sum of money to a country you may never have lived in.

So ask yourself four questions, and answer them honestly.

Is the money already in your account? Not "I could raise it." In the account, in a form you can move.

Who decides? If it is not only you — a spouse, a business partner, a family — have they agreed? Not agreed in principle that Japan is interesting. Agreed that this amount leaves this account when a house is found.

Why there? Not why Japan. Why that city, that neighbourhood, that street. If another region would do just as well, you have not chosen yet.

Would you send the money in three weeks? That is the actual question, and it is the one people avoid.

Here is what we notice, and we notice it often.

While someone is browsing — three cities, two countries, four different kinds of property, an akiya in the mountains and a machiya in Kyoto — they are enjoying themselves. There is no urgency, the options are all still open, and the looking is genuinely pleasant.

That state is fine. If you are still exploring, explore. Take as long as you like. Nothing in this book says you must hurry.

But when the right house appears, the mood changes completely. People who have been leisurely for a year become extremely focused, because there is exactly one of that house and somebody else is looking at it too. In Japan, once a full-price offer is in, displacing it is difficult. The person who moves first usually gets it.

The gap between those two states is where properties are lost. Not because the buyer was slow to decide they wanted it — they decided within an hour — but because the money was in the wrong account, or the person who had to approve it was on a plane, or nobody had ever established whether the family actually agreed.

So the work is to close that gap before it matters. Decide who decides. Move the money to where it can move from. Settle on a region rather than keeping five open. Do it now, while nothing is at stake, so that when something is, the only question left is whether you like the house.

People who have not done this do not lose properties because they hesitated. They lose them because they were still arranging themselves while somebody else was buying.

The cost of not moving

Nobody presents this side, so we will.

Good property moves in days. Not weeks. In desirable areas, a well-priced house is under offer inside a week, and often faster. The gap between seeing a listing on day one and day ten is usually the gap between viewing it and reading that it is gone.

Being unready is what loses properties. Almost never price. The buyer who gets the house is the one who could say yes on Thursday.

Without a reference point you cannot recognise a good deal. Someone who has watched a neighbourhood for six months knows immediately when something is priced ten per cent under. Someone who has read about Japan for three years does not. Market sense comes from watching real listings over time, and it cannot be acquired retrospectively.

This week

Three things. None commits you to anything, none costs money, and together they take about two hours.

Save three properties. Not the ones you would buy. The ones you find interesting. Go to SUUMO, translate the page, filter by two wards, and save three listings. The point is to convert an abstraction into three specific houses with specific prices.

Run one through the cost calculator. Take the price and see the total. This is the moment most people's budget becomes real, and it is better to have that moment now than after an offer.

Decide which kind of buyer you are. Home, holiday house, rental investment, or a business. Not forever — just enough to filter. Every subsequent decision depends on this one, and holding all four open is why people cannot choose between a Kyoto machiya and a Hokkaido cabin.

This month

Set your ceiling. One number, including the costs from Chapter 7. Write it down.

Establish where the money is. Not "I have it." Which account, in which currency, how many days to move it, and whether anything must be sold first. If a property appeared next Tuesday, could you complete? If the answer needs a phone call to find out, make the call now.

Decide about remote purchase. Would you buy without standing in the building? There is no correct answer, but the answer changes your timeline by months, and it determines whether you need to plan a trip.

Set up saved searches with alerts. All three portals. Ten minutes, and it is the difference between seeing new listings on day one and day ten.

What changes when you do this

Not that you will buy sooner. Something more useful.

You develop a reference point. Six weeks of watching real listings and you know what things cost. You will recognise a good price when it appears, and you will stop being tempted by things that look cheap because they are somewhere nobody wants to live.

Your conditions become specific. "Somewhere in Japan, maybe a machiya" produces nothing. "Sakyo-ku, under ¥35,000,000 all in, land over 100 square metres, prepared to renovate" produces a shortlist — and it lets anyone helping you actually help.

You can move at the speed the market requires. When the right property appears, you view it, you check what Chapter 12 says to check, and you offer. That week, not that quarter.

You stop being a person who is thinking about buying property in Japan, and become a person who is buying property in Japan. Those are genuinely different, and the difference is not knowledge. You already have the knowledge — it is in the twelve chapters behind this one.

One last thing

You do not have to buy anything.

Deciding that Japanese property is not for you is a legitimate outcome, and if this book has helped you reach it, it has done its job. Better to conclude that now than after you own a house in a village you have never visited.

But if you have read this far, you are probably not going to conclude that. You are probably going to keep looking at listings.

So look at them properly. Save three today.

Appendix: What we do, and what we don't.