Handing over to Tamaki Shinya: founder to home-grown second generation (2018)

Hand it over once it is healthy again — the founder’s choice of timing

The distinguishing feature of this succession is that the founder stepped back from the front line not in the middle of the crisis but once the path of recovery was visible. Faced with two consecutive years of losses just after listing, Tamaki Yasuhiro did not bring in an outside executive; he installed his home-grown eldest son, Tamaki Shinya, as vice-president and COO and entrusted him with four years of management reform. Only when the return to profit in the year to May 2018 was secured, through higher prices per house and a pruned store network, did he pass on the presidency and retire to the chairmanship. Rather than pushing losses onto the second generation along with the job, he appears to have chosen the order of laying out the route to recovery under his own regime first, and handing over afterwards.

Entrusting management to a son raised in advertising was also a choice to have the brand and the product line rebuilt along the extension of the low-priced volume model. After the handover, with pandemic demand added, revenue grew to record levels — but as the sharp fall in the year to May 2025 shows, the sensitivity of the business to swings in housing demand has not changed under the second generation. How to pass a company founded on one man’s first-person problem to a home-grown successor who shares those values: Tama Home’s 2018 handover can be read as a case of designing family-business succession in combination with the timing of a performance recovery.