Share House Rent by Area and Ward

Where you live changes what a share house costs, and looking at one listing after another rarely adds up to a sense of the going rate. This article takes the rent of the share houses listed on Shareclip and lines it up two ways: by area, and by ward within Tokyo. A third chart counts how many listings sit in each price band, so you can see where a budget lands.

One number stands behind every chart here. For each listing we take the lowest rent among its private rooms. That figure leaves out the common service fee, which in Japan is billed on top of rent and which may or may not cover water, gas, electricity and internet. So read these charts as a way of comparing listings with each other, rather than as the amount that will leave your account each month.

The figures are recalculated from the listing data every day, so they shift a little as listings come and go. What we write is the part that stays put: how to read each chart, what it cannot tell you, and what to confirm on a listing before you decide. The charts cover the share houses published in English on Shareclip, which is not the same thing as every share house in Japan.

Each row is an area, ordered from the lower median rent upward. The dot marks the median, the rent that sits in the middle when the listings of that area are put in order. The band around it covers the middle half of those listings, which is the range where most listings fall, and the dotted vertical line is the median for all areas together. A dot to the left of that line sits below the overall middle, a dot to the right sits above it.

The length of the band deserves as much attention as the dot. A long band means rents inside that single area spread widely, so an area whose median sits above your budget can still hold listings within reach at the left end of its band. Select an area name to move on to the feature article for that area.

Wards are ordered the same way, from the lower median upward, and the scale matches the area chart above so you can hold the two side by side. The small text beside each ward name shows which area it belongs to. Groups that hold fewer than ten listings are left out entirely: with only a handful of listings, one house arriving or leaving swings the median, so the row is not drawn at all, and a note under the chart says how many were set aside.

A single figure for a ward still smooths over the streets and stations inside it. Rent moves with the walk to the station, with the size of the room and with the age of the building, none of which a ward boundary knows about. Use a ward as a first filter, then confirm the rest on the listings themselves.

This chart counts listings by price band, using the same lowest private room rent as the charts above. The darker bar is the band that contains the overall median. Keep in mind that a house whose least expensive room falls in one band usually has other rooms above it, so a bar tells you where a listing starts rather than what every room inside it costs.

Find where your budget lands and you can see how much choice sits around it. When the bars near your figure are short, widening the area you are willing to consider, or easing one condition on the room itself, often opens up more than nudging the budget upward. It also helps to look at the bands on either side of yours, since the fee and the utilities can move a listing across a line.

Before you compare two numbers, add the common service fee to each of them. Share houses usually bill it separately from rent, and what it covers differs from one house to the next. Two listings that look settled on rent alone can change places once the monthly total is on the table, so ask what the fee includes as early as you ask the rent.

We use the median rather than the average, and the reason is worth knowing. The median is the figure in the middle when listings are lined up in order, so a few unusually expensive rooms cannot drag it upward the way they drag an average. It describes where an ordinary listing sits. Once the charts have given you a feel for a few areas, move on to the area features and compare real listings there, with the fee, the room and the contract in front of you.