What a landlord's information function is for

Our continuity planning now starts from the tenant. Strong-motion sensors in our 46 largest buildings, lift status from the maintainers and water, power and fire-panel status from the building management systems feed a single status service, and engineers add their floor inspections from tablets. Each floor carries one of five states, from not yet assessed to closed, and the service never uses the word safe, because that judgement belongs to qualified engineers and, after a large earthquake, to the local authority's rapid inspections. To pay for it in 2022 I relaxed the recovery objective for our lease and accounting systems from four hours to forty-eight, which our finance department and the group's internal audit accepted only after long discussion. We rehearse with tenants every September, and I count corrections as carefully as speed: one wrong status costs more trust than ten slow ones.

A Japanese office building runs on systems from many suppliers: building management, access control, lighting, car parks, solar panels, chargers and signage, each maintained by a vendor that has usually installed its own route in. In 2022 we counted 143 such connections across our portfolio, not including the lift makers' monitoring links, and nobody could account for 37 of them. We moved every vendor that could be moved to one remote-access gateway owned by us and operated by our monitoring centre, which approves each session, records it and closes it. The lift makers' links stayed separate, at their insistence and for good reasons, but we verified that each is physically isolated from the building network. My rule is that every route into a building's controls has a named owner, a written purpose and an expiry date.

Building information modelling is now common in Japanese design and construction, but a model handed over at completion rarely serves the people who maintain a building for forty years. For our 27-storey tower above a suburban interchange station, completed in March 2025, I asked for an asset-information requirement in the design-and-build contract: 2,150 maintainable items, each with sixteen attributes and a room or zone code shared with the building management system and the tenant portal. The contractor delivered the register alongside the model, and we accepted it only after sampling installed equipment against it. The first sample showed 9.2 per cent of records wrong; the second, 1.4 per cent. The register was loaded into our maintenance system six weeks before opening. What I have not yet solved is keeping it accurate through tenant fit-outs.

Much of our portfolio is old: a terminal building completed in 1971, a pedestrian deck over the station plaza built in 1987 that we maintain under an agreement with the city, and 4.8 kilometres of viaduct whose undersides we let to shops, clinics and nurseries. Inspections of these structures were filed for decades as reports and drawings, each inspector using a different sketch and, before 2004, a different grading scheme. Since 2023 we have recorded 9,400 historic observations against 1,860 fixed locations on one four-step scale, marking every grade translated from an older scheme. For the first time we can measure deterioration rates, and the capital plan has changed as a result: deck joint replacement moved forward four years and repainting deferred three. For the viaduct, the railway's findings for tenanted spans reach us within two working days.

Our tenant portal and app serve about 2,300 tenant organisations and the people who work in their premises: maintenance requests, meeting-room and loading-bay bookings, visitor passes, invoices and, since 2023, the earthquake status service. I separate two audiences that older systems confused: the tenant company that signs the lease and the individual employee who uses the building. Personal information about employees is handled under Japan's Act on the Protection of Personal Information, and I keep it to what the service needs. When our president wanted facial-recognition entry for every occupant of the new tower, I recommended an opt-in with cards always available and templates deleted within thirty days of someone leaving. Forty-six per cent of occupants have chosen it. I also turned down a proposal to sell anonymised footfall patterns from the app, because occupants never agreed to that use.

J-REITs and listed property groups publish energy, water and emissions figures for their buildings, and investors increasingly compare them across portfolios. The difficulty is that an owner controls only part of the data. In single-tenant logistics warehouses and some shops the tenant buys its own electricity, and the owner sees nothing unless the lease says otherwise. At Masaragi REIT Management in 2019, 41 per cent of reported floor area rested on floor-area estimates that were not labelled as estimates. Since then every figure we supply carries a coverage percentage and a method label: metered, tenant-reported or estimated. Green-lease data clauses now cover 14 of the 15 tenants who buy their own supply, and measured coverage has risen to 88 per cent. I am applying the same lineage to the group's preparation for Japan's sustainability disclosure standards.