Let me backtrack here a bit and post about buying property. Looking back into some of our files, I just found the vocabulary list we had prepared back when we were in the process of buying our land. We needed to get a few terms straight, especially concerning loan terms and purchase agreement. I thought I'd share this LIST as it was highly useful to us.
Since the loan was granted to my husband, he had to fill in all of the applications in Japanese. So while he fine tuned his Hiragana and Katakana, I printed out all of the terms and addresses I thought he would need to write in Kanji. Let me tell you, Mitaka has one mean character in it: 三鷹 Plus, it's one thing to write your kanjis in the comfort of your home, feeling pride in your progress, and quite another to fill out a detailed application in front of scrutinizing eyes.... So we carried this printout of our current and future address and other details in large characters to all of our official meetings with the bank and our realtor. Highly recommended!Also, we obviously couldn't read all of the terms of our land purchase contract so we asked a good friend to accompany us for the transaction. She eased our concerns by saying that even she couldn't make sense of all the small print... In any case, neither the realtor nor the seller of the land really care whether you master your kanjis. But the bank might... When we first approached banks about loans, one agent at a Downtown Tokyo SMBC branch of SMBC told my husband that it would be impossible for him to get a loan from their bank since he couldn't read ALL of the loan contract. Didn't matter if we had Permanent Residency and had been living in Japan for 20 years...
Ironically, we got our loan from the same bank, just another branch in our neighborhood! What really helped us was that our realtor made the initial contact with the loan officer and accompanied us to all of the initial meetings with the bank, along with his assistant Miyao-san. The loan officer was also really helpful as he arranged for us to have an English-speaking agent go over the details of the loan agreement with us.
Anyway, time to brush up on those kanjis...
2 comments:
Thanks very much for sharing this. In fact, thanks for blogging your homebuilding experience. We are behind you in the process, now preparing to submit loan applications in advance of finding that choice bit of land (Kunitachi, in our case), but have decided to settle after 13 years, 2 children (8 and 5), and basically our whole marriage (we married in Montreal less than a year before coming to Japan).
Thanks John for your comment and great to hear from another Montrealer!
We're happy this site can be of use. This is our first experience building a house ever, so we are quite green and the learning curve is quite steep especially given the language barrier. But we've been fortunate to find a really committed English-speaking architect and a really helpful real estate agent to guide us through the paperwork.
We'd love to hear about your experience too! Kunitachi is just a few stops away, so let us know if you're ever in our neighborhood so we can get acquainted!
Caroline & Efrain
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