Housing Office | Housing Information | Points to Consider when Visiting Rooms

When you visit rooms, you will be accompanied by a real estate agent. For housing offered through CO-OP and during peak seasons for moving, there are cases where you would visit the rooms alone.

In Japan, there are tens of thousands of real estate agencies, all with their own specialties. This includes agencies that have a strong presence in a certain district, franchises with a wide territorial reach, those with expertise in buying and selling real estate, and those with strong leasing expertise. Please find an agency that best fit your style through the internet and through visiting the agencies yourself.

When visiting rooms, we do not recommend seeing 10 or 20 rooms in one day. People tend to forget the earlier rooms they visited, and the visit becomes inefficient. It is more effective to pick out 2 to 3 rooms to visit based on prior information and documents that you can obtain, such as layout diagrams and other conditions for rent.

We also recommend that you visit the rooms during daytime to get a better sense of the rooms and the surrounding area. As for areas where the number of people passing by is different between weekdays and weekends, it may be good to visit on both days.

point 1	Maintenance condition of building
	Common Space（hallway, stairway, garbage disposal area, plants and other decoration, etc.）

point 2

Surrounding area

- Distance from station to apartment
- Level of crowdedness of train during rush-hour
- If within the 23 wards of Tokyo, noise level, number of people passing by on the streets. If living in the suburbs, convenience.
- Access to convenience store, supermarket, post office, and bank
- Availability of parking space (car, bicycle or bike)

（Reference）As there are many steep hills around Hongo Campus, please check your path to commute if you are thinking of using your bicycle.

・ Access to hospitals, educational institutions, and pre-schools / nursery schools (including vacancy of the pre-schools / nursery schools)

(Reference) Access to these facilities varies greatly depending on districts, so we recommend that you visit the ward / city office to check the situation of your preferred housing area in advance.

point 3

Room

・Amount of Sunlight

（Until what time in the evening the room receives sunlight, etc.）

・Safety

(There is housing equipped with auto-lock entrances, 24 hour surveillance cameras in hallways, and rooms with TV monitor screens to view visitors outside your door. Buildings with high level of security are popular.)

・Balcony and view from the window
・Kitchen

（Size of sink, cook top type, size of space to place refrigerator）

・Bathroom facility

（water heating systems differ among buildings）

・Number and location of electric outlets, telephone and LAN outlets
・Elevator

(If there is no elevator, whether the stairways are built completely inside or semi-outside the building makes a difference when it rains)

・Fiber optic cables

(There are buildings where you can only use ADSL)

・Number of common-use facilities

(If your housing complex has facilities such as coin laundry, it may be good to check on how many machines are available for the total number of rooms in the complex.)

If you like the room, we recommend that you also check whether your furniture will fit the room. It always helps to have a tape measure when you visit rooms. As Japanese rooms and their entrances tend to be narrow, please make sure that your furniture is capable of fitting through the door or hallway. It is also good to measure the size of the window to buy the right size curtains or blinds.