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Before I purchased my condominium in Nihonbashi, I spent close to two years watching Tokyo’s market.
I read transaction records, tracked listings, and walked neighborhoods I could not yet afford. I compared wards, building ages, management fees, and station access. By the time I finally bought, I had already seen enough listings to know that there is no such thing as a perfect property — only a property whose compromises you understand well enough to accept.
Even so, there were things I did not verify early enough.
Questions I should have asked before the second viewing, not after submitting a letter of intent. Details I understood only because I had already spent too much time in the process to turn back casually.
This essay is the checklist I wish I had carried to every property visit.
It is not a legal guide, and it is not a complete manual for buying real estate in Japan. It is simply a record of what proved to matter most to me after going through the process myself.
The surprises I encountered as a foreign buyer are covered in an earlier piece. If you are curious why I chose Nihonbashi specifically, that story is here.
Before the Visit
1) Know the building age — and what that age implies
In Japan, one date matters immediately: June 1981.
Buildings completed before that point were generally built under the old earthquake-resistance standard (旧耐震基準). Buildings completed after it follow the revised standard (新耐震基準). That distinction does not tell you everything about a building, but it changes the conversation at once. See the MLIT overview of earthquake-resistant housing for the official threshold.
It affects financing. It affects insurance. It affects the pool of future buyers. It affects how comfortable you need to be with structural and maintenance risk.
The condominium I bought was older. I made that decision consciously, knowing that I was accepting an older building in exchange for location and other advantages I valued more. But that kind of trade-off should be made deliberately, not discovered halfway through the transaction.
If a listing is for an older building, ask yourself the harder question immediately: am I open to an older building at all, and if so, under what conditions?
If the answer is no, you can save yourself a great deal of time.
2) Ask about the repair reserve fund before you become emotionally attached
Every condominium building in Japan has a 修繕積立金 — a long-term repair reserve set aside for major maintenance.
This is one of the first things I would ask about now, because it tells you whether the building has been preparing responsibly for its own future.
A low reserve balance in an older building does not automatically mean the property is bad. But it usually means one of three things: the building has under-collected for years, major repairs are approaching, or owners will eventually have to make up the difference through higher monthly contributions or special assessments.
In other words, if the reserve fund is weak, someone will pay later.
That someone may be you.
Do not wait until you are already imagining yourself living in the unit. Ask about the reserve fund early, and ask for the long-term repair plan if one is available. An older building with a credible repair schedule and a management association that has actually funded it is a very different proposition from an older building that has simply postponed the problem.
3) Calculate the monthly carrying cost in full, not just the purchase price
The listing price is only the first number.
The monthly obligations are the ones that stay with you.
In a Japanese condominium, that usually means some combination of 管理費 (management fee), 修繕積立金 (repair reserve), parking fees, trunk-room fees, or other recurring charges tied to the building. Depending on the property, these costs can materially change the economics of the purchase.
For an owner-occupier, they change the real monthly cost of living there. For an investor, they change the yield.
I have seen units where the headline price looked attractive, but the monthly fees were high enough to weaken the investment case immediately. I have also seen older buildings where the purchase price seemed reasonable until the management fee and repair reserve revealed the real cost of ownership.
If you are comparing multiple units, compare them on total monthly carrying cost, not price alone.
A cheaper unit with heavy monthly obligations is often not cheaper in any meaningful sense.
At the Property
4) Read the common areas as carefully as you read the floor plan
A condominium unit can be renovated.
The building around it is much harder to change.
That is why I pay close attention to the common areas: the entrance, the lobby, the elevator, the mail area, the hallway outside the unit, the bicycle parking area, the notice boards, even the condition of the garbage collection area if I can see it.
These spaces tell you how the building is actually being run.
A spotless lobby does not guarantee good management, but neglect leaves traces. Burned-out lights, broken fixtures, peeling notices, cluttered common areas, water stains, or the general sense that no one is paying close attention — all of these matter. They tell you something about the management association, the residents, and the culture of maintenance inside the building.
In older condominiums especially, management quality can matter as much as the unit itself.
I would rather buy an ordinary unit in a well-run building than a beautiful unit in a building whose common spaces already feel tired.
5) Check the orientation, the light, and what may eventually block it
South-facing units in Tokyo usually command a premium, and not without reason.
Light changes daily life more than many buyers expect. It affects warmth in winter, how a room feels in the morning, whether laundry dries easily, and how livable a home remains during the darker parts of the year.
But “south-facing” by itself is not enough. A nominally well-oriented apartment can still feel dim if another building stands too close in front of it.
So I would check three things every time:
- Which direction do the main windows face?
- What stands directly in front of them now?
- How likely is that view to change?
A north-facing apartment is not automatically a bad purchase. Some buyers care less about sunlight than others, and some units compensate with layout, openness, or price. But the point is to understand the trade-off before you buy, not after your first winter in the apartment.
6) Pay attention to what the listing photographs did not show
Property photographs are designed to sell the unit.
They are taken with the best light, the best angle, and the widest lens the photographer can reasonably use. They are not lying, exactly. They are simply selective.
The room will usually feel smaller in person. Darker, too. More ordinary.
That part does not bother me.
What matters is everything the listing did not show: the building next door, the sound from the main road, the distance from the station entrance you will actually use, the amount of sky visible from the living room window, the smell near the garbage area, the mood of the street after sunset.
These are not details you can outsource to a brochure.
If possible, visit the property more than once. Walk the route to the station. Stand outside the building at a different time of day. If the unit seems promising, look at the neighborhood as carefully as you look at the apartment itself.
A property is never just the floor plan. It is the route, the noise, the light, the block, the building, and the life that surrounds it.
Before You Sign
7) Verify the asking price against actual transaction data
One of the great advantages of buying in Japan is that the government makes a meaningful amount of transaction data publicly accessible.
Before you commit, use it.
The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism publishes actual real-estate transaction prices, and REINS data is also useful for understanding the surrounding market. These sources will not tell you everything about a unit, but they will help you answer the most basic question: is the asking price broadly consistent with what similar properties have actually sold for?
Do not rely only on the seller’s narrative or the broker’s urgency.
Look up comparable units in the same area. If possible, look at the same building or similar building stock nearby. Pay attention to building age, floor level, size, and renovation status. No two units are identical, but a pricing range is still better than intuition alone.
The data is available to everyone.
Most buyers still do not use it.
8) Do not sign the 重要事項説明書 unless you fully understand it
Before the transaction is completed, the seller’s agent is required to provide the 重要事項説明書 — the written disclosure document that sets out material facts about the property and the transaction.
This is not a ceremonial formality.
It contains the legal and practical details that shape what you are actually buying: ownership structure, land rights, management arrangements, restrictions, repair issues, and other facts that may matter far more than the listing page ever did.
It is also written in Japanese.
If your Japanese is not strong enough to understand legal and technical language comfortably, then you need someone who can review it with you in a language you fully understand. Not approximately. Fully.
This is one of the clearest things I can say to any foreign buyer in Japan:
Do not sign a property contract if the 重要事項説明書 still contains sections you do not really understand.
Real estate is expensive. Confusion is not a small problem when the confusion is attached to a mortgage, a title, and a building you may live in for years.
9) Confirm your financing before you submit a serious offer
A letter of intent is not the same as a final contract.
But it is not casual, either.
Once you submit one, you are signaling to the seller and the broker that you are a serious buyer. In Japan, where trust and procedural credibility still matter a great deal, that signal should mean something.
So before you submit a serious offer, know where you stand with financing.
Japanese banks vary significantly in how they treat foreign buyers. Some are comfortable lending to foreign nationals with stable residency and income in Japan. Some are stricter. Some are effectively unavailable depending on your visa status, employment structure, or length of residence. Even when a bank is willing to lend, the terms can differ more than buyers expect.
Do not treat financing as a detail to sort out later.
The right sequence is the opposite: understand your financing options first, then move on the property once you know what is realistically possible.
That does not remove all uncertainty. But it keeps you from making commitments on the basis of hope rather than approval.
After the Checklist Is Complete
10) Once the work is done, do not hesitate for too long
This is the part that can be misunderstood, so I want to be precise.
I am not saying you should rush into buying property.
I am saying that once you have done the work — once you have checked the building age, understood the reserve fund, calculated the monthly carrying cost, verified the price, reviewed the disclosure documents, and confirmed your financing — indecision becomes its own risk.
The best units in central Tokyo do not wait for your emotions to settle.
There is a point in every purchase where more analysis stops producing clarity and starts functioning as a way of postponing commitment. In my case, I felt that line very clearly. By the time I submitted my letter of intent, another buyer appeared almost immediately. He had more money than I did. It did not matter, because the seller had already decided to proceed with us.
That experience stayed with me.
The lesson was not “buy quickly.” The lesson was this:
be slow while you are still verifying the facts; be decisive once the facts are clear enough.
Those are not the same thing.
This list is not exhaustive.
Every building has its own history. Every buyer has different priorities. Every transaction introduces its own complications. What matters to a family buying a long-term home will not be identical to what matters to an investor evaluating rental yield, and neither of them will think exactly like a foreign buyer trying to navigate the process in a second language.
But these are the questions I now ask first.
They are the checks I would run before I allowed myself to become excited about a listing. They are the things that would have saved me time, reduced uncertainty, and made me more confident at the exact point where confidence matters most.
If I were walking into another property viewing in Tokyo tomorrow, this is the list I would bring with me.
Logged from Nihonbashi, Tokyo.
