Quote:
Originally Posted by MMM
Those "deposits" that don't get returned aren't deposits, and therefore don't get returned. Doesn't matter if you are gaijin or not.
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I forgot to comment on that bit. No one has them returned - it has nothing to do with being Japanese or not.
However - these days certain areas are moving toward reducing or making those fees completely illegal. Japan is sort of in a transition period, so some areas are FAR worse than others when it comes to this now. I can`t say from personal experience, but I have heard that Kyoto is terrible when it comes to these fees... One of my husband`s co-workers was sent there for a year and came back with stories of not being able to find anywhere with less that 6 months rent worth of "fees" in addition to the real deposits. (So a total of 8 months had to be paid in advance.) Not to mention being turned away at quite a few places because he was only going to be there for a year, possibly two. He thought it would be cheaper to rent a normal place, but ended up going with one of those furnished apartments (Leopalace) as it ended up being a lot cheaper in the long run. He`s Japanese, so foreignness had nothing to do with it.
Now that I think about it... I have to wonder if at least part of the lack of willingness to rent to foreigners in some places had/has to do with time of stay? If everyone thinks foreigners only hang around for a year or two, it might have something to do with it.
ETA; I have to say I do agree that a lot of it is past experiences, and hearing about past experiences of other land lords. I think I recounted this before on here (couldn`t find it with a search - I tried!), but in one of the apartments we lived in, a Filipino couple [Disclaimer - we weren`t close with them, and I`m not 100% sure. They might not have even been a real couple, all I know is that the visible female side was pregnant so I assumed.] lived in the same building. Turns out they totally trashed the place top to bottom, and ran away in the night (literally) leaving water on, lights on, and a bunch of unpaid utility bills for the landlord to pay. He was a very nice guy, always incredibly nice to us, and told me point blank that he thought we were great tenants but were very lucky to have moved in before them... Because if we hadn`t, he would never have trusted a foreigner - and doubted he`d be able to trust any again. All the other landlords in the little local landlord group had warned him, and now he was getting a bunch of "Told you so"s.
I couldn`t really blame him. They had to remodel the whole room, and the vacant one below it due to the damage.