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The story
Renters in their 50s can rack up 100 rejections before finding a place — a news story on the harsh reality of apartment hunting for older people sparked a reaction on 5ch. In recent years, rental contracts have come to rely on screening by guarantor companies rather than a personal co-signer, and elderly or unattached single renters are often screened out at this stage. Thread posters shared cases of tenants being told to vacate because they couldn’t line up the co-signers a guarantor company required, and stories of landlords demolishing aging buildings and turning them into parking lots to avoid the risk of a lonely death on the premises. Many recommended UR public housing as an alternative. Whether there’s any legal check on refusing tenants purely because of their age also became a point of debate.
“Turning 50 without owning a home — how long can you keep renting?” Some elderly apartment hunters face “100 rejections”… Is refusing tenants because of their age even legal?
9/11 (Fri) 10:00 JST
Lawyer JP News
Source: news.yahoo.co.jp / Original article here
What people said
Apparently that tenant is arguing "it's ridiculous that the guarantor company demands co-signers too," but that's just the guarantor company's policy, so nothing can be done about it.
Anyway, they packed up and moved out.
Wait, something doesn't add up here.
"Made the guarantor company mandatory and had them sign" → but they already signed the lease, so why file to vacate over not having co-signers??
"A guarantor company is for people who can't secure a co-signer" → but then it demands a co-signer anyway?
They probably just wanted a tidy excuse to push the old folks out.
Don't you have to hand over a lump sum up front to move into UR housing? Poor people don't have that kind of money.
You can get into city- or prefecture-run public housing, but those places tend to have long waiting lists.
Rates are shooting up though — are they okay carrying a mortgage? Or did they just buy outright in cash?
If you're in your 40s, that's probably your last shot. Get much older and you won't be able to get a mortgage at all.
These days it's mostly guarantor companies now, not personal guarantors.
True. If a personal guarantor were still mandatory, Japan would be full of homeless people.
On top of the guarantor company contract, you're sometimes also required to have a separate personal guarantor/next-of-kin contact.
For UR housing you need a monthly income at least 4 times the rent, or savings worth 100 times the rent.
The savings can just be "parked" money for the check, but the real question is whether you can scrape together that much cash even for a moment.
UR isn't really built for poor people.
And there's also a full year's rent paid up front, right? If you can put together 15 months' worth of rent — that plus a 3-month deposit — you could get in pretty easily. You do still need an emergency contact, though.
That emergency contact requirement is a real headache for people with no family.
There are shady "stand-in emergency contact" services out there, but you're not allowed to have them pose as relatives — apparently they'll only pretend to be an acquaintance at most.
An emergency contact can just be an acquaintance or friend, so you have no choice but to ask someone.
If the contact has a different surname and no blood relation, they'll definitely get called to verify — because that contact might turn out to be useless when it actually matters.
If it's just going to end up all elderly tenants, someone dies alone, and the unit becomes a stigmatized "incident property," we'd rather tear it down and turn it into a parking lot.
And honestly, more and more landlords are doing exactly that these days.
Exactly this. Better to clear the lot and turn it into a monthly parking lot.
Same here — we had the tenants move out, tore the building down, and made it a parking lot. There aren't many parking lots nearby, so it filled up instantly.
That's probably the sound call. Fine for a brand-new building, but for a place that's decades old, turning it into a parking lot gives more stable profit — and it never becomes a stigmatized property either.
I'm in about the same boat, and I've pretty much decided on UR housing — like 90% sure.
If some amazingly cheap used place came up that I could buy outright, sure, I'd consider it, but realistically that's not a likely option.
On the hardware side, maybe construction methods that make it easy to deal with a decomposed body.
Even handed over as-is, a stigmatized property still comes with property tax and future demolition costs. It can't really be free.
For a stigmatized property where someone with no family died alone, even the owner can't just go in and clear out the belongings on their own — so you can't even re-rent it. You can't even get the specialized cleaning crew in.
Huh, is that right. Guess I might be one of the winners then — I took out a 20-year variable-rate mortgage 20 years ago.
If you were investing too, you're not exactly a loser either lol
At the end of the day, the real problem is dealing with things after someone dies. Landlords don't want to handle the cleanup — and the property value drops too.
If you tack that cost onto the rent and charge elderly tenants more for it, you get branded as discriminatory and torn apart for it — so nobody does it.
In my family some of the paintings run into the millions of yen, and my mother's jewelry and kimonos add up to hundreds of millions, but I've got no interest in any of it — figure my brother, or a nephew or niece, can just take it lol
There's no way lawmakers are going to put legislation like that in place.
Landlords are running a business too — if it's a money-loser, they won't rent it out. They're not running a charity.
Rather than individual landlords, I'd guess big rental-management divisions will end up handling this in bulk. Going forward, the young population is going to keep shrinking fast, but the elderly population isn't shrinking anytime soon — if anything, elderly people with no family are only going to increase. When a big company runs it at scale, it keeps overall costs down, and repairs and day-to-day management get cheaper too.
Background and Key Issues
These days, rent guarantees mainly run through guarantor companies rather than a personal co-signer. This shift traces back to a 2020 revision of Japan’s Civil Code that required a personal guarantor’s scope of liability to be spelled out explicitly, which pushed landlords increasingly toward making guarantor companies mandatory. Screening standards vary from company to company, but in practice applicants are often turned down simply for being elderly or low-income. On top of that, when a single elderly tenant dies alone, the landlord is left to handle the practical fallout — sorting through belongings, arranging specialized cleaning, and absorbing the drop in property value — which makes demolishing an aging building and converting it into a parking lot look like the rational choice. At the same time, Japan has no law that explicitly bans refusing tenants on the basis of age alone; the only safeguards are voluntary schemes, such as municipal registries of “housing that won’t refuse elderly tenants.” Some replies in the thread also conflated guarantor companies with emergency contacts — worth noting that the two are actually separate things, a point that’s easy to get confused about.
※This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Newsplus) thread “‘Turning 50 without owning a home — how long can you keep renting?’ Some elderly apartment hunters face ‘100 rejections’… Is refusing tenants because of their age even legal?”
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