My grandmother's house in a small town in Iwate Prefecture stood empty for six years after she died in 2009. Nobody in the family wanted to live there, no local family wanted to buy it, and demolition would have cost more than the land was worth. It finally sold to a neighbour who needed parking, for less than the registration and survey fees. I think about that house whenever someone shows me a land price, because it taught me that a building's value depends on somebody still wanting to be there.
06 / Cost-of-capital planning for a listed developer
Revenue, year to March 2026
¥486.0bn
Condominiums, rental housing for the managed fund, reconstruction and renewal, detached housing and property management
Return on equity, year to March 2026
8.9%
Up from 6.1 per cent in the year to March 2022
Rental homes held by the fund our subsidiary manages
¥238bn
5,900 homes recycled since 2019; Mikurane keeps a 15 per cent stake
With fewer Japanese households every year, a developer's strategy is the short list of towns, buildings and partners it can stay committed to for thirty years, and I write that list before anyone writes a sales plan.
I am chief strategy officer of Mikurane Residential Co., Ltd., a fictional Tokyo housing developer listed on the Prime Market of the Tokyo Stock Exchange. In the year to March 2026 we earned revenue of ¥486.0 billion, handed over 3,420 new condominium homes, sold rental buildings into a fund our subsidiary manages and rebuilt or renewed condominiums older than most of our staff. We also own 45 per cent of a homebuilder in Texas and North Carolina. I report to our president, lead a strategy division of 46 people and present the medium-term plan and every large investment to the board.
My working life began on the other side of the table. In 1995 I joined a redevelopment company in Morioka as a planner and spent five years persuading sixty-four landholders around a station square to exchange their plots for floors in a single building. I then financed rental portfolios at a Tokyo trust bank for seven and a half years, studying real estate finance in the evenings, and joined Mikurane in April 2008, six months before the collapse of a US investment bank emptied our sales galleries. Every role since has asked a version of one question: who will still need this building, and who will pay to keep it standing, once the people who bought it have grown old?
Japan's population has been falling for well over a decade, and the number of households is expected to follow. That fact governs my work more than any interest-rate forecast. Since 2021 I have taken Mikurane out of suburban estates in towns that are losing residents, committed construction volume to three general contractors before buying more land, and recycled rental buildings into a fund so that our balance sheet carries the assets we are best at creating rather than everything we have ever built. Each of those choices made something smaller first: our land bank, our launch numbers or our rental income. I explain on these pages what each one cost, and why I would recommend it again.
Land a shrinking town no longer needed
Between 2022 and 2025 we sold 1,650 unsold lots in ten car-dependent suburban estates, recognised an ¥8.6 billion impairment and moved ¥64 billion into station districts in Sendai, Kanazawa and Kumamoto, where 1,180 homes sit above clinics, a childcare centre and shops.
A 1971 estate rebuilt with its owners
At Sasamegaoka Heights in western Tokyo, 89 per cent of owners voted in 2015 to replace five walk-up blocks built before the 1981 earthquake-resistance standard. We accepted a 6.5 per cent projected margin against our usual 12 per cent hurdle; the 520-home building opened in March 2019 and 229 original households came back.
A minority stake that kept the founders
In 2017 we bought 35 per cent of Pellridge Homes, a Dallas homebuilder, for US$105 million instead of buying all of it. Its annual closings have grown from 1,400 to 2,600, and our share of its profit was ¥5.8 billion in the year to March 2026, about 17 per cent of our net profit.
Rental buildings recycled rather than accumulated
Since 2019 we have sold 5,900 rental homes, now valued at ¥238 billion, into a private fund managed by our subsidiary with a life insurer and a corporate pension fund as co-investors; we keep 15 per cent. Return on equity rose from 6.1 per cent in the year to March 2022 to 8.9 per cent in the year to March 2026.
Current focus
I am preparing the board's review of our next medium-term plan, which begins in April 2027. Its hardest question is how far to grow condominium renewal, where hundreds of ageing buildings need repair finance and owner consensus far more than a developer's floor area, and whether a business made of those smaller projects can earn our cost of capital. Alongside it I am testing a second US region with Pellridge and agreeing with our fund's investors how to price the next tranche of rental buildings now that Japanese interest rates are rising.
Conversations I welcome
I am not seeking an executive move. I would accept one outside directorship at a listed Japanese company outside housing, construction and property lending, with the consent of Mikurane's board, and I can give it about twenty-eight days a year. I would serve on a nominating or compensation committee and contribute to strategy and capital-allocation discussions. I also speak a few times a year to municipal planners, institutional investors and housing researchers, and I welcome those invitations.
Beyond the page
The record behind the perspective.
In the boardroom
Mikurane Asset Management Co., Ltd.Non-executive director, nominated by the parent company · 2019–present
Pellridge Homes, LLCDirector, one of two Mikurane nominees · 2018–2021
Formation
Bachelor of Engineering in Architecture and Urban PlanningKanaumi Institute of Technology · 1995
Master of Science in Real Estate Finance, evening programmeTsukimura Graduate School of Finance · 2006
Akiko's papers tell the board what a recommendation will take away before they tell us what it adds. When she proposed leaving the suburban estates, the first page listed the impairment, the staff affected and the residents we would disappoint. That is why we could decide in one meeting rather than three.
Masaaki HidakawaFictional outside director and chair of the nominating committee, Mikurane Residential Co., Ltd.The full record ↗
Contact
I am not seeking an executive move. I would accept one outside directorship at a listed Japanese company outside housing, construction and property lending, with the consent of Mikurane's board, and I can give it about twenty-eight days a year. I would serve on a nominating or compensation committee and contribute to strategy and capital-allocation discussions. I also speak a few times a year to municipal planners, institutional investors and housing researchers, and I welcome those invitations.
