Company history

The idea began in 1980, when Tamaki Yasuhiro, then thirty, went to the United States as an auditing student and looked closely at how Americans built houses. What struck him was the gap: a high-specification American home cost roughly $1,323 (¥300,000) per tsubo (about 3.3 m²), while Japanese custom homes ran far above that. Back at the family construction firm Chikugo Kosan, he spent from 1992 developing a low-cost house and selling it at ¥250,000 per tsubo — half the prevailing rate of ¥500,000 or more.

In June 1998, aged forty-eight, he split that division out of the family business and incorporated Tama Home in Chikugo, Fukuoka, with a handful of staff and ¥10 million of capital. It was a spin-off, not a start-up, and the separation was the point: a general contractor cannot run a standardized, volume operation inside its ordinary work. The first model home opened in Chikugo in January 2000 at $2,302 (¥248,000) per tsubo — a figure set from what customers would accept, not from costs added up. Two-storey wooden custom homes were packaged to compress design hours and materials procurement; small roadside showrooms and heavy television advertising brought in first-time buyers in the suburbs. Tamaki’s phrase for it was to build houses “like Uniqlo — cheap and high quality.”

Growth then ran west to east. After the Fukuyama branch in 2003 came Kansai (2004), Tokai (2005) and Kanto (2005); an Osaka head office opened in June 2004 and a Tokyo head office in June 2005, giving the company three headquarters. Revenue moved from ¥1.9 billion in the year to May 2001 to ¥22.6 billion in 2004, ¥80.9 billion in 2006 and ¥167.9 billion in 2008 — more than doubling in each of its first three full years. The fiftieth store opened in November 2005, the hundredth in December 2006, the hundred and fiftieth in October 2008. On quality under that pace, Tama Home leaned on craftsman training and posted the names of the tradesmen working on each site.

The post-Lehman contraction hit a company selling to first-time suburban buyers: standalone revenue fell from ¥181.7 billion in the year to May 2009 to ¥153.7 billion a year later. The response was to stop being a single-product builder. New Daianshin no Ie (2009) met the national long-term-quality housing standard; Genki no Ie (2009) held the low-price end; New Kibo no Ie (2010) offered three storeys for urban lots. A 583-lot subdivision at Ibaraki went on sale in 2012, adding developed housing to the custom-build core.

Store openings continued through the downturn — the 200th in March 2011 — and in January 2011 the Okinawa showroom completed coverage of all 47 prefectures, thirteen years after founding. In March 2013 Tama Home listed directly on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange and the Fukuoka Stock Exchange main board, skipping the Second Section and Mothers entirely. Tamaki personally held 36.23% of the shares, so the company entered the public market with family control intact; a public offering the following month raised capital to ¥4.31 billion. Consolidated revenue at listing was ¥152.3 billion.

The consumption tax went from 5% to 8% in April 2014. Demand had been pulled forward into the year to May 2014, lifting revenue to ¥169.5 billion; what followed was the reckoning. The year to May 2015 brought ¥149.5 billion of revenue and a net loss of ¥6.4 billion — the first loss since listing — and the year to May 2016 another ¥138.3 billion and ¥4.4 billion loss. Orders fell 25%, from 10,076 houses at the time of the IPO to 7,575. Worse, store openings had carried their own momentum: independent stores kept rising from 161 to 181 even as revenue shrank, so the fixed costs stayed while the sales did not. Advertising alone had reached ¥6.6 billion in the year before listing. Low price, it turned out, was not reassuring to buyers whose disposable income had just been cut — it made them hesitate.

In July 2014 the founder’s eldest son, Tamaki Shinya, then thirty-five, became representative director, vice-president and COO. He had joined in 2001 and come up through advertising, and from February 2014 had carried responsibility for the management reform committee; from August he also ran the sales division, concentrating field command in one place. His father stayed on as president while day-to-day execution moved down.

The reform had two axes: raise the price per house and prune the store network. In October 2014 came Daianshin no Ie PREMIUM, an upper grade of the flagship; in 2016 the ZEH-compliant Daianshin no Ie ZERO, followed by lower-priced and three-storey ZEH variants, widening the range across both price and performance. Stores were cut from 181 to 170. Orders recovered to 9,826 houses by the year to May 2018, revenue to ¥167.9 billion and net profit to ¥2.0 billion. Only then, in August 2018, did the founder hand over the presidency — Shinya at thirty-nine became president, Yasuhiro chairman.

Under the second generation the numbers ran to records. Consolidated revenue rose through ¥186.9 billion (year to May 2019), ¥209.2 billion, ¥218.1 billion and ¥240.8 billion to a peak of ¥256.1 billion in the year to May 2023; orders peaked at 12,324 houses in the year to May 2021 as the pandemic pushed households toward buying homes. Operating profit roughly doubled from ¥7.3 billion to ¥13.2 billion, the highest since listing. Alongside the volume, the specification kept climbing: Daichi no Ie (2021) for high insulation, products meeting the top insulation grade 5 from May 2022 — which put ZEH-level performance into the standard specification — and Egao no Ie in 2023. The company moved to the TSE Prime Market in April 2022.

Ownership was reorganized in parallel. The founder’s personal 36.23% stake was moved into a family holding company, TAMAX, which by the year to May 2025 was the largest shareholder with 39.29%, with four members of the Tamaki family holding 3.0% each directly — the founder’s individual holding down from over a third to 3%, but the family total above half at 51.29%.

Then the market turned. After the Bank of Japan ended negative interest rates in March 2024, mortgage rates rose and housing starts shrank; revenue for the year to May 2025 fell 18.9% to ¥200.8 billion and operating profit 67.3% to ¥4.1 billion, back to where the company had been in 2019. Orders dropped to 8,836 houses, below the IPO-year level. Management’s reading was that the market is contracting and polarizing, and that a customer base weighted toward first-time buyers has to be planned around. Its answers so far have been internal — recruiting experienced sales staff from mid-2025, a new low-priced product in February 2025 — and structural: of the ¥200.8 billion, ¥146.1 billion came from housing and ¥47.8 billion from real estate, as the firm works toward four pillars of custom homes, developed housing, renovation and property rather than the single one it was founded on.