Where do you start buying your own home?

[mighty58]

I went through the price/size/neighbourhood dilemma as well. I looked at listings for years and saw maybe 15 places in person before I ended up pulling the trigger on a place in Yokohama a couple years back. I wanted 150m+ of floor space, with all the typical convenience factors, for a reasonable price of course. I was not willing to have a 10min+ walk to the station, it had to be <30min commute, and daily life amenities had to be close. I found that the neighbourhood had the biggest effect on pricing, followed by the usual suspects like convenience within that neighbourhood, build quality, etc. So I ended up moving from one of the most desirable neighbouhoods in Kanagawa to one that wouldn't even make the top 100 list. But in the big picture, I'm actually pretty well situated, 6min to station, major rail/shopping hubs close (7min train, 18min bicycle) and 30min to my job in Tokyo.

Not really rules for thumb, but I'd suggest thinking about:

• your definition of "location convenience". ie. the relative importance to you of having hip restaurants/shops actually in your own neighbourhood vs. being able to hop on a short train ride/bicycle to get to them.
• the relative importance of daily life amenities. I’d argue that having supermarkets, drug stores, convenience stores etc. close by and (preferably) in the same direction you’d walk home from the station will be much more convenient than restaurants or boutiques that you'll only visit occasionally.
• how important you feel neighbourhood cache is to you. Do you want people to be impressed when you tell them where you live? I’m not trying to sound facetious, because prestige is a very real factor for people in choosing a location… so you need to be honest with yourself and assess how important this is for you (or your spouse), and price it in if necessary.
• resale value. This being Japan, I expect my house to go down in value, but I want to minimize that as much as possible. Some sh**box a 20min walk uphill from the station, no matter what station, will have a higher rate of value depreciation than one well situated. A larger plot of land that could be split into two or three to be resold will obviously have more resale value than one that has already been split. This was important for me as I may one day leave Japan, and wanted to minimize the potential downside in an exit became necessary.

[TJKansai]

Not really rules for thumb, but I'd suggest thinking about:

• your definition of "location convenience". ie. the relative importance to you of having hip restaurants/shops actually in your own neighbourhood vs. being able to hop on a short train ride/bicycle to get to them.
• the relative importance of daily life amenities. I’d argue that having supermarkets, drug stores, convenience stores etc. close by and (preferably) in the same direction you’d walk home from the station will be much more convenient than restaurants or boutiques that you'll only visit occasionally.
• how important you feel neighbourhood cache is to you. Do you want people to be impressed when you tell them where you live? I’m not trying to sound facetious, because prestige is a very real factor for people in choosing a location… so you need to be honest with yourself and assess how important this is for you (or your spouse), and price it in if necessary.
• resale value. This being Japan, I expect my house to go down in value, but I want to minimize that as much as possible. Some sh**box a 20min walk uphill from the station, no matter what station, will have a higher rate of value depreciation than one well situated. A larger plot of land that could be split into two or three to be resold will obviously have more resale value than one that has already been split. This was important for me as I may one day leave Japan, and wanted to minimize the potential downside in an exit became necessary.

All good pieces of advice, none of which we followed since we had a free plot of family land. The funny thing is our place now checks most of your boxes.

It is 4km to the nearest station, and at the time there was one supermarket 1km away (up and down two hills). Work was also a 4km bike ride, all uphill. There were only about 10 homes in the area, as it had previously been farmland.

Fast-forward to today, now there isn't a single open plot of land, we have 3 supermarkets nearby (closest is 400m), and a direct bus to downtown Kobe and my office. As the neighborhood filled out, it turned out to be good place for kids, and the local parks filled with kids playing all the time.

[mighty58]

Nice! Sounds like you got lucky with the neighbourhood, but just goes to show that real estate in Japan can go up. There are examples in the Kanto area as well of previously unloved areas suddenly getting popular, with a resulting rise in real estate prices. Now if there was only a way to predict where that'll occur beforehand...

[7-seasons.com]

Yep, running into all of these things now. It is painful to see that my friend's dad bought their house roughly 30 years ago in I believe a terrible location as it is 20+ minutes walk from a random Kanagawa station (he commutes to work by motorbike), and paid the same price as my friend who bought 5-6 years ago in a decent spot in Tokyo about 10 minutes from the station, smaller house of course. Now this same price gets almost nothing in Tokyo, and much less house/land even in the outskirts. The ones we checked online and with the agent in Tokyo are extremely old, small, rent-land, have a strange land shape like a triangle, or a family decided to themselves and the whole family (my wife said she wouldn't be able to use the toilet), in our price range.

We looked at 2 places up steep hills, and 1 in a flood zone, all in Kanagawa.

At this point we're looking at more "dream home" like areas that are 1hr to 1.5hr commutes with the hope that companies allow at least partial working from home forever into the future.

Anyone working in the countryside or permanent remote is fortunate on this front!

[Gulliver]

We ended up going for a pre-built home built by Pansonic

I’m interested in Panasonic homes. Did you get the high tech air conditioners that can control humidity and air purification at the same time. If so, Can you tell the difference in the comfort level and are they noisy?
Also, any other noteworthy perks that the Panasonic have over generic built homes? Finally, what was the price difference if any?

[Rezz]

We ended up going for a pre-built home built by Pansonic

I’m interested in Panasonic homes. Did you get the high tech air conditioners that can control humidity and air purification at the same time. If so, Can you tell the difference in the comfort level and are they noisy?
Also, any other noteworthy perks that the Panasonic have over generic built homes? Finally, what was the price difference if any?

Sorry for the late reply on this. I'm not sure if you mean the HEPA filter that Panasonic installs on some of its steel-framed houses or just a regular aircon unit. Our house is wood, so doesn't have the HEPA filter, but yes, our living room came equipped with a high-end Panasonic air conditioner. It has a sensor that tracks movement and something called "nano-x" technology which supposedly filters out a load of bad allergens and bacteria from the air. It's really quiet compared to our other aircon units and the air does feel a little different. It's hard to describe exactly, but I'd say it feels more like a naturally cooled environment than one being blasted by an air conditioner.

Lots of small perks about Panasonic homes above what I would have expected from a prebuilt generic home include preinstalled controllable lights in every room, self-cleaning toilets, removeable lights on the stairs that come on automatically and switch to battery power in the case of a power cut, lan and power sockets in every room (more power sockets than I was expecting actually), sliding wooden doors that automatically brake to stop them slamming, aftercare check-ups and "free" basic repairs for 10 years, lots of documentation and guides to maintain the house, paperwork handled for us for taxes and the government housing subsidy and a few other smaller things.

I'd say the price for the house itself wasn't too far off a regular medium-tier wooden housemaker. Not quiet Sweden Home level, but perhaps about 25% higher than other companies around the same level. Perhaps around double the bare minimum you'd expect to pay with the cheapest wooden housemakers. I'd say it's worth it for the added extras, but it depends what your priorities are.

[Beaglehound]

We have a couple of those soft closing sliding doors. Unfortunately my missus hasn’t quite mastered the technique and basically slams it into the soft close mechanism. I don’t expect said mechanism to last long…

[Ori]

[*]how important you feel neighbourhood cache is to you. Do you want people to be impressed when you tell them where you live? I’m not trying to sound facetious, because prestige is a very real factor for people in choosing a location… so you need to be honest with yourself and assess how important this is for you (or your spouse), and price it in if necessary.

If you have children of a school age, then neighborhood is very important because of quality of schools and overall "quality" of the friends your child will make there, which might define their future to a great extent.
It't not only about "prestige".

[mighty58]

If you have children of a school age, then neighborhood is very important because of quality of schools and overall "quality" of the friends your child will make there, which might define their future to a great extent.
It't not only about "prestige".

Very true. I would argue though, that there is a huge middle ground between the richest and the poorest neighbourhoods in Japan, and the difference between neighborhoods within that middle ground is less than you might think. I don't want my kids hanging around with super wealthy types any more than I want them associating with the super poor demographic, for the same reasons you are alluding to.

Having said that, the fact that our local public shogakko is a brand new building with all the best facilities has been a nice surprise, although I sdmit it didn't play a huge role in my decision making when I bought.

[Established]

Very foolish question here. How do you know what area has "good schools". Are there rankings for elementary, junior, and senior high schools? Is there any way to view this info on a map or overlay?

My wife I and I are pretty settled on public elementary. However, we are prepared to pay for Junior or senior high school.