Six roles inside the buildings and behind them

Mandate

Bring corporate IT, building systems and building data under one executive, make the portfolio's continuity planning serve tenants, and give the board and investors figures whose sources can be traced.

Outcomes

• Moved continuity spending from a ¥1.2 billion second data centre to a tenant status service; all 71 buildings showed a status within 26 minutes of a February 2025 earthquake.
• Closed 131 of 143 vendor remote connections into building networks and moved vendors to an owner-operated gateway.
• Wrote a 2,150-item asset-information requirement into a ¥64 billion tower contract; first-year reactive work orders 27 per cent below the previous new building.
• Recorded 9,400 historic inspection findings against 1,860 fixed locations, changing the timing of two major repairs.
• Raised measured energy coverage in the REIT's disclosures to 88 per cent through the services agreement.

Decisions in context

I came back from the asset manager in April 2021 to become the property company's first chief information officer, a role created when the president decided that corporate systems and building systems could no longer be run by separate departments with separate budgets. The first year was spent on inventories: of systems, of vendor connections, of the data behind our disclosures. The work since has followed from what those inventories found. Continuity planning now starts with tenants; remote access to building controls is owned and recorded; new buildings arrive with registers we can use; and old structures have inspection histories that show rates of change. I present to our board several times a year and report to the group's risk management committee each spring and autumn. I also sit on the board of the group's shared systems company in an executive capacity.

Reason for the move

Current role. Not seeking an executive move; would consider one outside directorship with the Masaragi group's consent.

Mandate

Build reliable property, lease and environmental data for the REIT's disclosures and acquisition reviews.

Outcomes

• Restated three years of energy data and disclosed measured coverage of 59 per cent in 2019, labelling every estimate.
• Negotiated green-lease data clauses with 14 of 15 tenants who bought their own electricity.
• Introduced a data review in acquisition due diligence; one 2020 warehouse purchase was repriced by ¥380 million.
• Cut the time to assemble the REIT's semi-annual property data from five weeks to eight working days.

Decisions in context

The group seconded me to its J-REIT's asset manager in April 2017 to run systems and investor data, a move common in Japanese sponsor groups and one I asked for. I wanted to see how a building looks from the investor's side of the table. The asset manager had 54 staff and a portfolio of offices, shops, warehouses and rental flats bought largely from our property company. My team of seven assembled the property and lease data behind each semi-annual securities filing and the annual sustainability report, and reviewed sellers' building data during acquisitions. The decision that defined my four years was the 2019 energy restatement, which I took to the investment corporation's board against the preference of the asset manager's president. I also learnt how an investment committee weighs data quality against price, which I now use every time I write a board paper.

Reason for the move

Secondment ended; recalled to become the property company's first chief information officer.

Mandate

Merge the corporate IT and building systems teams and replace the lease-management system.

Outcomes

• Replaced the lease-management system across 3,100 leases without a missed billing cycle.
• Launched the first tenant portal for maintenance requests and invoices; 71 per cent of requests arrived through it by 2017.
• Agreed the protocol under which the railway shares viaduct inspection findings on tenanted spans within two working days.
• Wrote the property company's first information security policy covering building control systems.

Decisions in context

In April 2012 I took over a newly merged department that put corporate IT and building systems under one manager for the first time. The two teams had different suppliers, different vocabularies and some suspicion of each other. The largest project was replacing the lease-management system, which held 3,100 leases and drove every rent invoice; we ran old and new in parallel for three billing cycles. The tenant portal followed in 2014. The defining event came in 2015, when a fragment of concrete fell from a viaduct span onto a tenant's storeroom roof. The railway had recorded the defect fourteen months earlier, but nothing connected its inspection records to our tenancies. I negotiated the sharing protocol with the railway's structures department, which still operates. Alongside the job I completed an evening MBA in 2015. I left when the group asked me to take on the REIT's data.

Reason for the move

Seconded by the group to the J-REIT's asset manager to build its systems and investor data.

Mandate

Build a portfolio-wide equipment register and plan the renewal of ageing building management systems.

Outcomes

• Built the first equipment register for 60 buildings, about 41,000 items, used to cost long-term repair plans.
• Renewed building management systems in 14 buildings to a common points standard.
• Coordinated building-status reporting for tenants after the March 2011 earthquake.
• Drafted the facilities section of the post-2011 continuity plan.

Decisions in context

I moved from the building-management company to its parent property company in April 2006 to manage facilities systems across the portfolio. My first task was an equipment register: until then, each building kept its own lists in its own format, and long-term repair plans were estimated from building age. With a team of nine and the cooperation of every building manager, we recorded about 41,000 items across 60 buildings over three years. I also set a common points standard for building management systems so that renewals stopped producing fourteen different vocabularies. On 11 March 2011 I coordinated our response to tenants from beside the monitoring screens, and I spent much of the following year drafting the facilities section of a new continuity plan. I now think that plan put too much weight on our own systems, but the register we built is still the backbone of the maintenance system.

Reason for the move

Promoted to lead the merged information systems department.

Mandate

Connect the group's buildings to a central remote monitoring centre and run it around the clock.

Outcomes

• Connected 46 buildings to the remote monitoring centre by 2005.
• Cut nuisance alarms by 58 per cent by rewriting alarm rules around operators' decisions.
• Introduced written response procedures for the 40 most frequent alarm types.

Decisions in context

I joined the railway group's building-management company in October 1999, moving from the supplier's side to the owner's. The company was building a remote monitoring centre so that one night shift could watch many buildings, and I was hired to connect them. By 2002 I was running the centre. It taught me how alarms fail the people who receive them. Operators were drowning in signals written for the equipment, and the important ones arrived in the same tone as the trivial. We rewrote the rules around the decisions operators actually took, cut nuisance alarms by 58 per cent and wrote response procedures for the most common forty. By 2005 the centre watched 46 buildings. I left when the property company asked me to look after building systems across its whole portfolio, which meant moving from watching alarms to planning the equipment behind them.

Reason for the move

Recruited by the parent property company to manage facilities systems for the whole portfolio.

Mandate

Install and commission central monitoring systems in new and renovated office buildings.

Outcomes

• Commissioned central monitoring systems in 38 office buildings across Tokyo and Kanagawa.
• Introduced a points-verification checklist later adopted across the Kanto field teams.
• Led commissioning teams on four buildings from 1997.

Decisions in context

I joined Kasumori Building Controls straight from my engineering degree in April 1993 and spent six and a half years commissioning central monitoring systems. The work was physical: walking plant rooms and risers with a points list, checking that each sensor reported what its label claimed and that each command did what the drawing said. In thirty-eight buildings I never found a list that was right the first time, and I developed a verification checklist that the Kanto field teams later adopted. From 1997 I led commissioning teams of my own. The job showed me how much of a building's data is fixed in the weeks before handover and how rarely anyone checks it again. I left because I wanted to see what happened to these systems after the engineers left, and the only way to see that was to work for an owner.

Reason for the move

Wanted to work for a building owner and see how systems performed after the commissioning engineers left.