Buying a house in Japan Part 5 - The Hunt is on!

(Ok, I know I promised the reps in this installment, but I think that I'd better discuss the actual hunt first, so wait 'til the next time please!)

As we were now basically had narrowded down our preferences and done some initial scouting, we were now ready to more seriously start to hunt down the Salaryman-cave that we both wanted.

Basically the search went through two separate ways; one was our own hunting via Internet to see if we could find a house that A) Was the size we needed B) Located in the area we wanted (i.e. train stations) C) Within our price range. There's no lack of search sites avaliable (yahoo.co.jp and athome.co.jp are two respectable ones) and most of them allowed for quite sensitive search criteria; which was good. The bad was that not much came up... In parallel with our own efforts, the Father-in-Law had also made it his mission to help us in our hunt, travelling around to local smaller real estate agents to see if anything new that hadn't made it to the Internet yet had shown up.

For a few months, this was quite depressive since basically very few attractive places showed up and those that did oftentimes looked much better on paper than in real life or had some catch included that wasn't clearly stated (e.g. construction was delayed so wouldn't be available until later than we had planned etc.).

There was a time when we had basically all but given up and resigned to the fact that we would have to make some considerable concessions in our search criteria (the above A, B and C...) to have any chance of finding a place that would be worthy to serve as the permanent base of operations for years to come. Then through a stroke of luck, through the efforts of the FIL we managed to get our filthy hands on some information that had not yet gone up on the Internet, but that is story for the final installments in this great series!