aspiring to buy a home in Yokohama. . .
 

hmm i dont know too much about prices in Kanagawa prefecture but my friend have buy a house with 3 bedrooms for 70,000 us dollars somwhere in Osaka so i think that u will need much more than 10,000 for ur dreams house ;]

I was just putting the 10,000 as a down payment and financing the rest. I was not intending on buying anything for a total of 10,000. lol.

But that home your friend has sounds ideal. So 100,000 should get me close to what I want.

Thanks!

unless you're Japanese, don't be banking on a loan/mortgage to help you out...

it is possible to obtain a loan as a foreigner but you would want to have permanent residence visa or a longer term work visa with a pretty secure job. it is not easy to get one as a foreigner.

Yahoo!
this is where you can see prices. If you can't manage to navigate around this site, which is in Japanese, then you shouldn't be bothering. I'm looking to buy, many years down the track, a place in kansai region so i have been looking just to get a feel for prices.

as said before, how exactly are you planing to stay in Japan? i hope you have some visa's worked out because being a property owner certainly won't be enough.

3-4 bedroom home in Yokohama for $100,000? Multiply that number by about 10, and then you are getting more realistic. You can barely by a home in Honolulu for less than a million dollars. The average price for a home of any size in Wichita, Kansas is $175,000 dollars.

mate, unless i'm misreading the real estate page you are completely wrong. Now my Japanese is not near as good as yours so i could be reading it wrong but you are way off with prices. Trust me i know how expensive it is in america and australia but Japan is different. check out the website i showed you above. houses just aren't that expensive in Japan. SeeD is on line with that price range. Mind you brand new properties will be more expensive. and can be more in the range of a few hundred k US

I think you might be off by a zero. I know a family that bought a three-bedroom apartment in Yokohama for about 750,000 dollars a few years back.

Average apartment price in Tokyo area tops 50 million yen for first time in 15 years:J-CAST Business News

Average apartment price in Tokyo area tops 50 million yen for first time in 15 years
8, 29. 2007
The average apartment price in the Greater Tokyo Metropolitan area stood at 53.05 million yen in July 2007, exceeding the 50 million yen level for the first time in about 15 years. The price previously topped that level in November 1992, when the bubble economy was nearing an end. The average price then stood at 57.11 million yen. The Greater Tokyo Metropolitan area covers the Tokyo, Chiba, Saitama, Kanagawa and Ibaraki prefectures. In the city-size wards of Tokyo, the average price exceeded 70 million yen. This survey was announced by Real Estate Economic Institute Co. on July 13, 2007.

50,000,000 yen = about a half-million dollars.

Need a lot of money for that.

well MMM i'm not going to doubt that information but i think you should check the real estate site i linked to above, the yahoo! one, you will see many properties are much more affordable than what you state there. mind you i wasn't looking at tokyo, but osaka, kyoto, hyogo. also my prices are for houses, not apartments. so these are not central locations in the middle of the the prefectures major city but not far in my books from city. i was looking in hyogo and found some really nice places for about $140kAUD about 20-30mins from central Osaka City.

new 2008 properties are about 3000万 to 5000万 in some of the regions i was looking at. once you get to about 6 years old and older the price for many is 1000万 or less. I checked just Kansai areas though.

If you ask me, you would be crazy to buy a more expensive house in the 5000万 price range because i can't see japanese house values increasing unless they make a change to their immigration policy with their declining population and what economists are predicting to be an economy set to go nowhere but down, at least from what i have read.

Out of the city and into the country the prices drop dramatically, I would whole-heartedly agree. She said she wanted a house in Yokohama, the second biggest city in Japan and a short distance from Tokyo, the most expensive city in maybe the most expensive country in the world.

Four out of five homes bought in America are "used". In Japan this number is the opposite. The reason is (according to the book Saying Yes to Japan) is that building contractors have lobbied the Japanese Parliament into taxing the purchase of a used home through the roof. A 1000万 asking price is before the taxes you have to pay to purchase and sell a used home.

A friend of mine's home was damaged in the Great Hanshin Earthquake of 1995. It was monumentally cheaper for them to basically live in a hotel for 2 months and hire contractors to rebuild their house from scratch than it was to purchase a used home.

So, yes, I would not argue there aren't homes for 100,000 USD in Japan, but she was asking about Yokohama, for which I would say "Good luck".

no worries then, and just my mind when thinking of a city is the city and surrounding areas. i never really think of the central part of the city itself when people say a city so that is what i was thinking places 20-30mins from.

i had a feeling taxes/stamp duty etc would be pretty nasty but not sure where to get that info. i'm not even sure i will eventually buy a place in Japan, from current trends i don't think it is a very good investment. in places like australia you are assured of your house's value increasing at a great rate over the years you own it but the same is not to be said for Japan from what i can gather.

mmm's right, i asked a few guys at work today about city-based apartments for under 10million yen and they just laughed... even a 1dk in the city is likely to be double that cost in yokohama/tokyo so it's going to increase a LOT for a full house

yeah, it gets crazy out here because of how expensive the land is

Just for the record, my parents put down about $100,000 as down payment to buy a house in Mitaka, Tokyo.

I think you should have something like that to begin with or otherwise no banks will loan you the money you need to finance your property.

Good luck!!

Welcome tommasi,

Similar in the way I always question why people want to take a "budget" vacation to Japan (as I have said several times, why fly all the way to Japan for a month to live like a homeless person?) Would you really want the cheapest house in one of the most expensive cities in the world?

i think that is more of a personal preference MMM. i for one have lived in an incomplete house that is falling apart all my life. i have no dreams of having a flash amazing expensive house, no matter where i live. I find other things in life to value. so i would have no problem buying a cheap cheap place in one of the most expensive cities in the world, as long as it had the essential things i need. no one is going to buy a place purely on price, it must meet certain requirements.

mind you Melbourne is not that cheap a city, ranked 60 in 2007 for the world an increase of 14 spots from the previous year and i imagine that has only grown further in 2008.