The walk that took fourteen minutes, not eight

My first lesson in property marketing came from a tenant who walked from the station with our leaflet in her hand. The flat was where we said it was, but the eight-minute walk took her fourteen, because the shortcut we had assumed crossed a car park that closed at night. I was twenty-three and working at the counter of Sakuradome Chintai, a rental brokerage in Tokyo, after completing a sociology degree at Kitaminori University in March 1998. My manager apologised and corrected the leaflet. I remember her patience more than our error, and I have not treated a walking time as a minor detail since.

At the counter I learnt how quickly an applicant judges a broker's honesty. Students and young workers asked about key money, renewal fees and guarantors before they asked about the kitchen. Many applicants from abroad were refused by owners before they had seen anything. I passed a national licensing examination for real-estate transaction specialists in 2000 and became deputy manager of a branch near two universities. I could explain a contract clearly, but I could not change what an owner decided, and I noticed how much frustration began with an advertisement that promised more than the counter could provide.

In 2003 I joined Ienomado Publishing, which produced a rental and resale listings magazine and website for the Kanto region. As a listings editor I checked brokers' advertisements before publication against the property industry's fair-competition rules on advertising and our own standards. Later I led nine reviewers. We queried floor areas, model-room photographs presented as the actual unit, phrases such as 'newly renovated' without a date, and listings left online after the home had been let. Brokers sometimes argued that a stale listing was harmless because the caller could be offered something similar. I came to see that redirection as the harm itself.

Tsunagite Residential hired me in 2008 to lead marketing for a Tokyo rental manager housing residents from abroad and the employees of international companies. We prepared leasing explanations in English, Chinese and Korean, later adding Vietnamese, and trained staff to explain guarantor companies, deposits and renewal fees before a viewing rather than after an application. Owners worried about language and payment. We answered with our own portfolio's tenancy and payment record, and over five years the number of owners willing to consider foreign applicants roughly doubled. I also learnt that translation is not explanation. A correct English summary could still leave someone unprepared for waste-sorting rules or a two-month notice period.

I returned to Matsumoto in July 2013, partly to be nearer my parents and partly because Kumoribashi Estates offered work that joined my interests. The company, founded by the Ogimachi family in 1971 and listed in Tokyo since 2007, manages rental homes across Nagano Prefecture, brokers resale houses and develops resort apartments. I began as manager of resort and second-home sales marketing. Overseas buyers were arriving in larger numbers, often expecting the conventions of their own markets, and I spent those years explaining management fees, repair reserves and property tax to people who had been shown only a price. One Australian couple told me they would have bought anyway but would have budgeted differently, and that remark became the starting point for our first ownership-cost guide.

In 2016 I became general manager of marketing, with responsibility for a growing vacant-house brokerage. Heirs living in Tokyo or Osaka were selling parents' houses they had not entered for years. Buyers relocating from cities, some working remotely, wanted space and lower prices but feared unknown repairs. I became executive officer and CMO in April 2021. I report to our president, Shunsuke Ogimachi, and present marketing, listing standards and complaint analysis to the board of directors. I am not a director.

My team works through four managers: brand and advertising, listing standards, the multilingual leasing desk and customer research. Pricing belongs to the business units, surveys to qualified inspectors and legal interpretation to our legal team. My contribution is to make sure that what we publish can be confirmed by the person who arrives to look. That has meant fewer enquiries, slower sales and uncomfortable conversations with owners and agents. The cases on this site record those costs alongside the results.

I am now preparing for a first outside directorship. I think my questions would be useful wherever a company tells the public what it sells: what the customer believes after reading our material, and what that customer finds on arrival.

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