Hi all. Just arrived in Sasebo, finding this forum very informative. I was wondering if anyone has any recommendations for realtors who are willing to work with Americans to find houses/apartments in town besides what can be found on the cho board. We have a cat and there has been next-to-nothing on the cho board that accepts cats the past couple weeks -- or maybe it's all been disappearing during the noon rush, I dunno. There's a long list of realtors in our housing packet but it's just a list of names and phone numbers so I'm hoping someone has personal experience with one or more of them. Time is a factor because we were taken completely by surprise by an offer of housing in Hario after being here less than 2 weeks - we've turned that down, so we're going to lose TLA in about a month.

GL finding a realtor. I dont know much about Sasebo, but JapanBases.com is going to be expanding throughout the years to every base in Japan and having offices near all of them. Sorry we cannot help you now, but in the future we will.

Anyone out there have any recommendations?

One of the problems, and the reason we created the Housing section here http://www.japanbases.com/housing.aspx , was because people went into housing agencies blind sided to if they were good or bad agents. Now, you can actually comment and rate each housing agent in our section. For now its going to be Yokosuka agents, and then we we are planning to expand to Atsugi, Zama, and Yokota areas.

One thing to ask is if the landlord is willing to be 'flexible'. When I went through base housing there wasn't a lot of good options for me either, but there seemed to be a lot of willingness to add things into the lease for a fee.

For example: Need a 2nd AC unit - sure, for 4500/month. Need a washer/dryer - sure, for 4500/month... etc. etc.

So if you find one that's what you are looking for but for that one last detail, it doesn't hurt to ask.

Also it's PCS time and a lot of folks are leaving. I don't know what your timeline or constraints are but there should be new housing options opening up in about a month or so.

As for the realtor - I didn't get a good answer to that one myself when I asked a couple of months ago.