Who will still need this building in thirty years?

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.

I studied architecture and urban planning at Kanaumi Institute of Technology and graduated in March 1995. My graduation project proposed new uses for the closed shops on a regional high street, and it was naive: it assumed that buildings fill up once they are made attractive. My first employer corrected me. In April 1995 I joined Ishiwari Urban Redevelopment Corporation in Morioka, a third-sector company owned by local public bodies and private shareholders. Its scheme replaced a station-front block of 64 small landholdings with one building through rights conversion, in which each owner exchanges a plot for floor space of equivalent value. I spent five years at kitchen tables explaining valuations to shopkeepers and widows. The building opened in 1999 with 120 homes, a market hall and a floor of municipal services. The company's second scheme stalled in 2000 when the department store meant to anchor it withdrew from the city, and I learnt that a plan is only as strong as the tenant who must pay for it.

In October 2000 I moved to Tokyo and to Kurotaki Trust and Banking, where I structured non-recourse loans and trust arrangements for rental-housing portfolios that developers were selling to investors. It was the period in which Japanese property began to be owned through funds rather than only by companies and families, and I watched developers discover that they could build more if they did not have to keep everything they built. I completed a master's degree in real estate finance at Tsukimura Graduate School of Finance in evening classes in 2006. Lending taught me to read a project's cash flows. It also kept me one step removed from every decision that mattered.

I joined Mikurane Residential in April 2008 as a senior manager in investment planning. By the autumn our sales galleries were empty, and we wrote down ¥21 billion of condominium inventory in the year to March 2009. My job became the land-acquisition screen we still use: a test of how many homes a district has absorbed over ten years, by household type, before we bid for a site in it. In its first year the screen stopped six purchases, and a colleague in land acquisition did not speak to me for a month.

In 2011 I proposed a business that rebuilt and renewed old condominiums, because the country's stock of 1970s buildings was ageing faster than its owners could organise themselves, and in April 2012 I was asked to build it. Our first project, Sasamegaoka Heights in western Tokyo, took three years of meetings before 89 per cent of owners voted to rebuild. In a condominium, I learnt, the owners are the client, the lender and the planning authority at once, and a developer who forgets any of those roles loses the vote.

From 2016 I led corporate planning. I recommended a minority stake in a US homebuilder rather than an acquisition, argued the company out of building hotels at the height of the inbound tourism boom and set up our rental-housing fund with two institutional investors. I became Mikurane's first chief strategy officer in April 2021 and a managing executive officer in April 2024.

I lead 46 people, most of them planners, analysts and former project managers. I ask them for two things: a map before a spreadsheet, and the name of whoever will be inconvenienced by each recommendation. I am not a director of Mikurane, but I present to its board several times a year, and I write those papers on the assumption that the outside directors know less than we do about housing and more than we do about how companies fail. As a nominee director of our US partner and of our asset-management subsidiary, I have learnt to keep the interests of the company that appointed me apart from those of the company whose board I sit on.

Inside the industry I am known for opinions that have cost Mikurane revenue: that most old condominiums will be repaired rather than rebuilt, that a developer should stop selling new houses in towns that are losing households, and that construction crews are now scarcer than land. I hold them because I have seen what happens to places and owners when a developer sells and moves on. My grandmother's house is still a car park.

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