This is one of the first questions people ask when they're planning a move to Osaka — and one of the most consistently underestimated. The answer you'll find in most general guides, forum posts, and relocation checklists tends to be something like "two to four weeks." That figure is technically accurate for a well-prepared Japanese applicant with stable domestic employment, a Japanese guarantor, and a completed documentation file ready to submit.
For most foreigners, it describes a best-case scenario that requires everything to go right from the first search to the key handover. In practice, the timeline is longer, the variables are more numerous, and the moments where things slow down are almost never the ones people anticipate when planning from overseas.
This article gives you the honest picture: what the actual timeline looks like, where time is most commonly lost, and what shapes the difference between a search that takes three weeks and one that takes three months.
For a foreigner with a complete documentation file, a foreigner-friendly broker, a standard employment visa, and a flexible timeline that avoids the peak rental season, finding an apartment in Osaka takes approximately three to six weeks from the beginning of active searching to key handover.
For a foreigner who is self-employed, searching during繁忙期 (the peak March–April season), without pre-approved guarantor company options, or trying to coordinate the move from outside Japan without in-person viewings, the realistic timeline extends to six to twelve weeks — and can run longer if early applications are rejected and the search needs to be reset.
The difference between those two scenarios is not luck. It's preparation, profile management, and understanding where the system creates friction for non-Japanese applicants before you're already in the middle of it.
Breaking the apartment search into its actual phases — not the idealized version, but what it looks like on the ground — makes the timeline legible in a way that aggregate estimates don't.
| Phase | What Happens | Typical Duration | Where Foreigners Lose Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0. Preparation | Assembling documents, understanding your guarantor options, defining your search criteria | 0–3 weeks (often skipped) | Almost always: starting Phase 1 without Phase 0 complete |
| 1. Active Search | Browsing listings, viewing apartments, identifying viable candidates | 1–4 weeks | Applying to apartments that are inaccessible to your profile; losing viable apartments during decision delays |
| 2. Application | Submitting the formal application, guarantor company screening, landlord approval | 1–3 weeks | Document gaps discovered mid-process; guarantor company rejections; landlord refusals due to nationality |
| 3. Contract and Setup | Signing the lease, paying initial costs, scheduling utility setup | 1–2 weeks | Gas inspection delays; bank account not yet established; insurance requirement surprises |
| 4. Key Handover | Receiving keys, move-in | 1 day to 1 week post-contract | Building maintenance schedules; cleaning completion delays |
The total from the start of active searching to the day you receive keys: minimum 3 weeks, realistic average 5–8 weeks, extended scenarios 10–14 weeks.
What changes those numbers is not the search itself — Osaka has abundant inventory — but the friction that accumulates at each phase for foreign applicants specifically.
The preparation phase is invisible on most relocation timelines, but it's the one that most determines how the rest of the search unfolds. Most foreigners skip it entirely — they start browsing apartments on Suumo or searching Facebook groups before they've addressed a set of questions that will directly determine which apartments they can actually rent.
The questions that need answers before you start searching:
Foreigners who skip this phase typically lose 1–3 weeks during the application phase when the gaps surface, plus they sometimes lose specific apartments they had already identified while resolving them.
The search phase feels like the main event — the part where you're scrolling listings, requesting viewings, and imagining your life in different apartments. In terms of real time expenditure, it's often the phase where foreigners lose the most time without realizing it's happening.
Not every apartment listed online is available to a foreign renter. A meaningful proportion of Osaka's rental inventory — the exact percentage varies by ward and building type, but it's significant enough to affect any search — is effectively unavailable to non-Japanese applicants regardless of income, visa status, or preparation quality. Landlords who instruct management companies not to proceed with foreign applications do so quietly; the listing remains visible and apparently available until you inquire and the refusal comes back informally.
The practical consequence: a foreigner searching without filtering for genuinely foreigner-friendly inventory spends a portion of their search time on apartments that were never viable for them. Each inquiry-and-rejection cycle takes 1–5 business days. Across 4–6 attempts, that's potentially 2–3 weeks of elapsed search time producing zero viable candidates.
Osaka's rental market — particularly the mid-market, well-located, correctly-priced inventory — moves faster than most foreigners arriving from overseas expect. A good apartment in Nakatsu or Nishi-ku at ¥85,000 for a 1LDK can receive multiple serious inquiries within 48–72 hours of listing. The sequence from "this looks perfect" to "I need to decide" to "someone else took it" can compress to 3–4 business days when demand is high.
Foreigners searching from overseas — trying to make decisions about apartments they haven't seen in person, in a city they don't know well, in a market they're not sure they fully understand — systematically take longer to decide than the market rewards. This is not a character flaw; it's a rational response to unfamiliarity. But it has a concrete cost: good apartments are lost during deliberation cycles that assume more time is available than the market provides.
Understanding how the Japanese real estate market actually functions — including how listing-to-contract timelines work — is the baseline knowledge that makes faster, more confident decisions possible.
Japan's apartment viewing process has specific conventions. Apartments are shown by appointment, typically by the management company or listing agent rather than the landlord directly. Availability windows for viewings are often narrower than in other markets — many management companies operate on business hours only, don't offer weekend viewings for all properties, and may require 24–48 hours notice. For someone searching from overseas or trying to schedule viewings around a work trip, the logistical friction of viewing multiple apartments in a compressed timeframe is real.
This is where foreign applicants consistently lose the most time, and where the gap between a smooth search and a difficult one is most clearly defined. The application and approval phase in Japan involves more parties, more sequential steps, and more opportunities for delay than rental markets in most other countries.
A standard Japanese rental application doesn't involve a single approval decision. It involves a chain: you submit an application to the management company, the management company submits to the guarantor company for screening, the guarantor company approves or rejects, then the management company presents the application to the landlord for final approval. Each handoff takes time, and each party in the chain has its own processing timeline.
For a Japanese applicant with a clean profile, this chain resolves in 3–7 business days. For a foreign applicant — where the guarantor company may need to verify international documentation, where the management company may need to communicate unusual circumstances to the landlord, where the landlord may have questions that require additional back-and-forth — the same chain can take 2–3 weeks, sometimes longer.
Foreign applications can be rejected at any point in the chain, for reasons that range from explicit to opaque. Guarantor company rejections are typically explained by income thresholds or documentation gaps. Landlord rejections via management company are often conveyed simply as "the owner's preference" without further detail. Each rejection resets the search to the candidate selection phase — not to zero, but to a point that involves finding another viable apartment, submitting a new application, and waiting through another approval cycle.
One rejection adds an average of 2–3 weeks to the total timeline. Two rejections add 4–6 weeks. This is the compounding risk that most people don't factor into their planning.
Mid-application document requests are common for foreign applicants. Standard documentation for a Japanese applicant (residence certificate, income certificate, employment certificate) may be supplemented for foreigners with requests for: residence card copies with specific information, passport copies, previous residence documentation, international income proof with certified translations, bank statement requirements in specific formats, or employment contract specifics. Discovering that your income documentation doesn't meet the required format after submission has already begun costs 3–7 days at minimum while documents are gathered and resubmitted.
This phase is shorter but contains specific friction points for foreigners that are rarely mentioned in general relocation guides.
Japanese lease contracts are lengthy documents — typically 20–40 pages — in Japanese. Management companies are legally required to explain key terms before signing, but this explanation is usually conducted in Japanese. For non-Japanese speakers, this creates either a dependence on a translator or an uncomfortable situation of signing a legal document whose contents you don't fully understand. The initial costs payable at this stage — security deposit, first month's rent, agency fee, guarantor fee, insurance — are also due at or near signing, which requires having funds accessible in a Japanese bank account or via a method the management company accepts.
One of the most reliably surprising friction points for newly arrived foreigners: in Japan, gas cannot be activated without an in-person inspection by the gas company, conducted in your presence at the apartment. This inspection must be scheduled, typically takes 1–2 hours, and cannot be skipped or deferred. During peak moving season, gas company schedules back up significantly — inspections may be booked 5–10 business days out. Until the inspection occurs, there is no hot water and no gas cooking. Understanding how utility setup works in Japan as a foreigner — and scheduling the gas inspection immediately upon lease signing rather than after move-in — prevents this from becoming a multi-day inconvenience.
The full picture of what happens on and after your first day with apartment keys in Japan is worth reading before you reach this stage, not after.
The variables that most significantly affect your search timeline, in rough order of impact:
Japan's rental market has a pronounced seasonality that most foreigners don't know about until they're already in it. The period from late January through April — driven by Japan's academic and corporate calendar, where new school years begin in April and corporate assignments typically start in spring — is called 繁忙期 (hanbou-ki), or peak season. During this window:
The practical implication for a foreigner: a search that begins in February or March is competing against the highest demand volume of the year, with the slowest processing times and the least landlord flexibility. The same search beginning in June, September, or November encounters a market that is measurably more accessible: more time per apartment, more negotiating room, faster approvals.
If your move timeline allows any flexibility at all, avoiding the February–April window meaningfully changes both the difficulty of the search and the quality of apartment you can access at any given budget. This is one of those pieces of market knowledge that's worth knowing before you commit to a start date.
The role of a broker in compressing a foreign apartment search is specific and worth describing precisely, because "using a broker" can mean very different things.
A broker who specializes in foreign clients doesn't just show you apartments. They bring a set of operational advantages that address the specific friction points foreign applicants encounter:
A broker with established relationships with Osaka's management companies and landlords knows, in advance of any specific search, which buildings and landlords have a track record of successfully renting to foreigners. They don't apply to buildings where the landlord's instruction is to avoid foreign tenants — they simply don't put those buildings in the candidate set. This eliminates the inquiry-rejection cycle that consumes 1–3 weeks for foreigners searching independently.
A broker working regularly with foreign clients has established relationships with the guarantor companies that process foreign applications efficiently. They know which companies accept which visa types, what income documentation they need in what format, and how to present a borderline application to maximize approval probability. This preparation happens before the application is submitted, not during it — which is why guarantor rejections are dramatically less common in professionally managed foreign searches than in self-directed ones.
The application package submitted to a management company represents the first impression the landlord receives of you. A professionally prepared application — with documentation organized according to Japanese conventions, with the covering information that Japanese management companies expect, with the broker's implicit endorsement as someone who vets their clients before submitting — is received differently from a self-assembled application that follows no particular format. This difference is not always decisive, but in a competitive situation it is sometimes the margin between acceptance and rejection.
Perhaps the most underappreciated advantage: a broker who knows the market, has seen the building, and understands your priorities can give you a rapid, confident assessment of whether a specific apartment is a genuine fit. That assessment — delivered by someone you trust rather than extracted from a listing photo and a floor plan — enables faster decisions when good apartments appear. Faster decisions mean fewer apartments lost to other applicants during deliberation.
If you're planning a move to Osaka, building your timeline around the honest picture rather than the optimistic one protects you from the cascade of problems that arrive when the move hits friction you didn't account for.
A realistic planning framework:
The honest answer to the question this article started with is: for a foreigner searching independently, without the preparation this article describes and without local knowledge of which buildings and management companies are actually accessible, finding an apartment in Osaka can take 8–14 weeks from first search to key handover. That's the realistic range for a self-directed search with a normal amount of friction.
For a foreigner working with a broker who specializes in foreign clients — with pre-filtered inventory, established guarantor company relationships, professional application preparation, and the local market knowledge to give confident guidance quickly — the same search typically takes 3–5 weeks. The compression comes from eliminating the friction points described in this article, not from cutting corners.
At Maido Estate, we've run this search process for foreign residents across the full range of visa types, employment situations, budgets, and neighborhoods. We know which parts of the process tend to create delays for which profiles, and we structure the search to address them before they become problems rather than after.
You can see how Maido Estate searches on your behalf in detail. Or if you want to start with a conversation about your specific situation — your timeline, your profile, your requirements — that first discussion is free, carries no obligation, and will give you a much clearer picture of what your search will actually look like and how long it's likely to take.
Knowing what you're walking into is always better than discovering it in the middle of a search that's already behind schedule.
Maido Estate is an independent real estate agency based in Osaka, specializing in helping foreign nationals rent, buy, and invest across the Kansai region. Timeline estimates in this guide are based on typical search patterns observed across a range of client profiles and should be treated as general guidance rather than guarantees for any specific situation.
Foreigner-friendly. Bilingual. Exclusive listings.
Contact us today and move in within 2 weeks.
We have a curated selection of properties for rent and for sale across Osaka.
View properties
