If you're planning to relocate your business to Osaka, you've probably already pictured the moment: an office somewhere in Umeda or Honmachi, an apartment nearby, a fresh start in a city with real energy and none of Tokyo's saturation. What most people don't picture is that they'll be running two separate, high-stakes property searches at once — one for a business, one for a life — and that neither search behaves the way it would back home.
Generic "how to start a business in Japan" content tends to treat the office as a checkbox on a visa application and housing as something you'll "sort out once you land." In practice, the two are entangled from the first week, and the entanglement is exactly what catches capable, well-funded entrepreneurs off guard. This article is about that entanglement — what actually blocks people, what gets misunderstood, and why the real estate side of relocating a business deserves as much attention as the business plan itself.
Anyone who has rented an apartment in Japan as a salaried employee knows the drill: a stable employer, a payslip, a guarantor company that mostly cares whether your income covers the rent several times over. Anyone who has leased commercial space knows a different drill: a registered company, a business plan, sometimes a personal guarantee from the representative director.
A relocating entrepreneur has to clear both bars simultaneously — usually before the company has any Japanese revenue, before you have a Japanese employment record, and often before you're even a resident yet. You're asking a landlord and a guarantor company to take a bet on a business that doesn't have local history and a person who doesn't have local history either. That combination is the actual obstacle, far more than any single document being hard to obtain.
It also matters what kind of business you're bringing. A consulting or software founder who needs a desk, a meeting room, and a credible address has a much narrower — and often faster — office search than someone opening a restaurant, a clinic, or a retail space, where zoning, fire safety, and fit-out requirements add months to the timeline. Either way, the housing search runs on its own separate clock, and it doesn't wait for the business side to be tidy.
Most entrepreneurs relocating to run a business in Japan will go through the Business Manager visa, and its requirements around premises tightened significantly with the reform that took effect in October 2025. The rules aren't cosmetic — they change what kind of address will actually satisfy an immigration examiner, and they've raised the financial bar around the whole relocation.
That last point is the one the real estate side of your relocation actually has to solve, and it's more demanding than it sounds.
Virtual office services used to be a common shortcut for founders who wanted a Tokyo or Osaka business address without committing to a lease before their visa was approved. That shortcut is closed under current rules. The premises need to be real, dedicated to the business, and appropriate to what the business actually does — a one-person consulting firm and a restaurant will not be judged the same way, but both need an address an examiner can point to and say, this is where the work happens.
A fair number of entrepreneurs ask whether their own apartment can double as the registered office, especially early on when cash flow is tight. It's possible in principle, but it's a genuinely narrow path: the lease has to explicitly permit business use, and there has to be a clearly separated work area rather than a laptop on the kitchen table. Most standard residential leases in Osaka prohibit business registration at the address outright, precisely because landlords don't want a company's mail, visitors, or liability attached to a unit they lease as a home. Finding one of the buildings where this is actually workable — and negotiating it explicitly with the landlord rather than assuming it's fine — is a very different task from finding an apartment to simply live in.
There's a sequencing trap that surprises even well-prepared founders. To register a company in Japan, you generally need an address to put on the incorporation documents. To convince a commercial landlord to lease to you, many want to see a company that already exists. Solving this usually means leasing initially under your own name or through an intermediary step, then formally transferring the address once incorporation is complete — a workaround that a landlord unfamiliar with foreign-founder situations may simply refuse to entertain. It's a small procedural wrinkle on paper, and a genuinely common point of delay in practice.
This is the part generic relocation content skips almost entirely: the housing search for a self-employed founder is structurally harder than the same search for someone with a Japanese employment contract, independent of how much money is in the bank.
Guarantor companies (hoshou gaisha), which now stand behind the large majority of rental contracts in Osaka, are built to underwrite predictable risk. A salaried applicant with a stable employer is the easiest profile to score. A new company with no filed tax return, an owner whose income is "whatever the business generates," and no local credit history is, from the guarantor company's underwriting model, close to unscorable. Some will simply decline. Others will approve, but attach a higher fee, ask for a larger security deposit, or require a second guarantor — conditions that rarely appear on the listing and only surface once an application is already underway.
Landlords layer their own caution on top of that. Many owners in Osaka, particularly of smaller buildings, still make the final call themselves even when a guarantor company has approved the file, and a new business with no track record reads as more uncertain than a transferee sent by a known employer — regardless of the actual financial strength behind either one. None of this is personal, and it isn't unique to foreigners; it's the same caution a Japanese first-time freelancer runs into. It just lands harder on someone who is also new to the country, the language, and the paperwork.
Even once you accept that you're running two searches, the harder problem is that they don't share the same logic. Left uncoordinated, they compete for the same limited things — your capital, your time, and your attention — in ways that create real friction.
None of these tensions is unsolvable on its own. What makes them hard is that they have to be resolved together, against a visa clock, by someone who doesn't yet know which Osaka neighborhoods actually deliver what they promise.
The instinct to treat "find an office" and "find an apartment" as two separate projects — maybe even with two separate agents — is understandable, but it's where a lot of avoidable cost and delay creeps in. A lease signed for an office that later turns out not to satisfy the immigration examiner's expectations means starting the premises search over, on a clock. A guarantor company application for housing submitted before the business entity and income situation are properly documented tends to get flagged, slowing down a process that was already tight. An apartment chosen purely on price, in a building where the landlord would never have agreed to a company registration next door, can quietly complicate the paperwork for both.
This is precisely where working with someone who handles both commercial and residential real estate in Osaka — rather than treating them as unrelated transactions — earns its keep. It isn't about doing the paperwork for you; it's about sequencing the two searches correctly from the start: knowing which landlords in which buildings will actually consider a new company with no local track record, which guarantor companies take a more realistic view of self-employed and founder income, and how to present a file so it reads as credible rather than risky on first pass. It's also about the negotiation itself — a landlord who hesitates at "foreign-owned new company" often reconsiders when the terms, the guarantees, and the documentation are presented by someone they've worked with before.
In practice, that coordination usually means working alongside your visa or tax advisor rather than instead of them — they own the legal and immigration side, we own the property side, and the two conversations need to stay in sync so the office address on your registration and the lease actually agree with each other on paper. We've sat on the other side of enough of these applications in Osaka to know where landlords hesitate, where guarantor companies want more than the standard file, and which parts of a relocation timeline have zero slack in them.
The honest answer to "can I get an office and an apartment in Osaka as a new foreign entrepreneur" is almost always yes — but the path, the timeline, and the budget look different for every profile, depending on your business type, your capital, whether family is relocating with you, and how much of the paperwork is already in motion. Entrepreneurs who do well with this process tend to be the ones who map out both searches together early, rather than discovering the friction between them halfway through.
If you're at the stage of planning your move to Osaka and want a clearer sense of what's realistically possible for your specific situation — and where foreign entrepreneurs most commonly lose time or money in the process — a first conversation costs nothing and tends to save far more than it takes. We're happy to walk through it with you, in English, French, or Japanese, whenever you're ready.
