House hunting

I'm currently house hunting, which seems to be a relatively easy thing, provided you plan to do a regular move within Tokyo. Being new in the country and hunting for a furnished apartment, things are a little more complicated. Furthermore, everyone says that Tokyo would be such an incredibly expensive place to live in. Now, so far I came to find that this is NOT the case for many if not most aspects of daily life - excluding housing.

Born in Germany and grown up in a free-standing house, space was never really an issue. Also later, flats offering decent amounts of room remained affordable (excluding ridiculously expensive places like London). Tokyo however, IS amazingly expensive, if you are looking for something of the size that you are used to in most parts of Europe.

This is of course not surprising in a country that has to squeeze all elements of an highly sophisticated industrial society into a small strip between the sea and almost irreclaimable mountains.

Costs for a regular flat pile up to cover a number of things: It's normal for instance to pay the equivalent of one month's rent to the agency (without an agent it's very difficult to find something at all), two month's rent deposit and two month's rent of so called 'key money' (which is essentially bribery) - at least!

Ah, and then you pay rent for at least one month in advance. So, in the best case this adds up to about 6 months worth of rent that one pays, just to set the first step into the new home. Of all this money, you are however likely to only see one month's rent again by the time you move out.

Now that's for the regular situation. In my case I'm looking for a furnished flat, and there things are a little different. Usually, one saves the key money and also the deposit - if paid at all - is not that high. However, the rent is generally higher, given the space provided compared to an unfurnished flat, which is not surprising as the apartment is fully equipped.
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To give you an idea: A 42 square meter, furnished apartment coming along in a Europeanish style and with a separate bedroom can easily be around 450'000 Yen or approximately 5'000 Swiss Franks. In top locations like in the new Mori Tokyo Midtown complex (picture above) apartments are even far beyond that. One has to say though that such places usually are focusing on expats and other parties where the company pays for the apartment - or your regular millionaire coming to town for a few weeks or months.

Such apartments are also generally located in areas popular with foreigners and the building would usually be a serviced one (doorman, cleaning lady, gym, car parking etc included).

Needless to say that I plan to spend a little less than that, in particular, as I will spend my time more in class and out on the street than at home. Well, we shall see what we get...