@seedofessence First, contact PRESTIA, Resona, and any other bank you might want to work with and get a pre-approval. Just pick a property on Sumo that closely matches your ideal size, cost, and location for the pre-approval. More expensive is better as this is a test to check how much you can get in loan. The pre-approval will be done in a day or two or just over a phone call. This will roughly reflect the amount of money the bank is willing to loan you. If they cover 100% then, check what is your max allowance for loan. Different banks will give you different rates and loan amounts and terms. For comparison I got the following pre-approvals using different properties and banks: 100M at 0.3%, 120M at 0.5%, 98M at 0.27%, 80M at 1.2%. PRESTIA did about 5 pre-approvals for various properties I submitted. Resona did 3 pre-approvals. SBI Shinsei did do any pre-approval but they gave me their maximum amount in loan they can provide based on my annual income and property to be purchased in 23-ku Tokyo.
At 13M yen (assuming you’ve been working in the same company for at least 4 years) PRESTIA would probably cover 80M to 97M. If you have a shorter tenure than coverage would be less. You can ask for max allowance and cover all fees and expenses in your loan.
For down payment you may need 2-4M in cash. Typically this is the cash advance you would make to “hold” the property for you when your apply to buy and process loans. If you buy a new property built and sold by a developer then you most likely don’t have to pay a realtor fees and can skip the cash down payment. Most of these developers do “full service” as in hold your hand and take you from 0 yen to house. If you contract with a house maker or builder they will bring their own agent for land search and either discount the realtor fees or exempt it.
I recently purchased a corner plot of land in 23-ku and built my own house. During that process I almost bought a second-hand house, a newly built house, and a newly built condo. So the above information is from personal experience. Take it with a grain of salt as your experience and milage may vary. I had 20M in cash on hand. I used about 7M in down payment and expenses like realtor fees, scriveners fees, property tax, acquisition tax, bank loan fees, etc. The loan covered my entire property costs including landscaping (at 0.3% rate). I splurged a bit on top of all that. By the time we finished construction, my cash balance was just 6M yen.
Location is key when you pick properties. We prioritized: being close to Kichijoji, 20-30 minutes from Shibuya or Shinjuku by train. Close proximity to a co-ed school and all girls school (not sure what the future hold, prepared for a girl or boy) and easy access to leave Tokyo by car on weekends. The only downside was my commute is 40-60min now which is annoying but reasonable.
