Making a phone call would be the best.

When we found a good land on athome, we contacted the realtor by telling thing below via contact form.

• We are looking for a house that is possible to renovate ourselves.
• Is it possible to keep the house in the image without being demolished.
• How bad is the damage on the house.
• If it’s stigmatized property.(心理的瑕疵物件)

I imagine it might be difficult to find a realtor that can reply in english, so you might have to have a help of someone that’s fluent in Japanese. Especially if the house is located in suburbs.

If you tell them clearly what your needs are then, most likely they are happy to reply within a day or two. In some cases, they might laugh at you for the idea of keeping such invaluable houses. Even if this happens to you, you just have to keep looking. When you get a good reply, you adjust the schedule with them.

When you inquire, making phone calls would be the best way because things move forward the fastest. We noticed some properties disappears from the list within a day. We guess there are lots of property investors out there who are checking the same list as us and buy it without even checking the actual house condition. Apparently those people care about only the location of the property so they can buy it through the phone.

Things we checked in the house.

We checked thing below then we visit the house for the checking.

• All the columns are not tilted too hard.
• 雨No signs of rain water leaking from the ceiling.
• No termite damages.

Those are the thing we thought impossible to fix ourselves. We checked all the columns with a level and ceiling with our eyes. We flipped some tatami and checked underneath. In some housed we visited, we found very much tilted columns and termites damages so had to give up to buy those.

The house we decided to buy passed our fist visit check. After seeing worse condition houses, maybe our eyes were bit dimmer than usual. Actually we found termite damage after we started renovation. The video below shows the actual termite damage. We hope you don’t make the same mistake.

After all, buy it!

We bought it on cash. If you are thinking of taking a loan, it might be difficult because of the house condition. If you have any concerns on this, the realtor will help you.

We hope this article will help you to find the best house for you.