Entering the roadside store business — diversifying beyond housing (1976)

A housing maker's resources, aimed at a non-residential market

The core of this decision was that the land intelligence and construction capacity accumulated in order to sell houses were redirected, unchanged, into the non-residential store market. Ishibashi Nobuo's observation that “nine out of ten buyers own no land” had originally been an argument for securing land in order to sell houses. But looked at from the other side, the same fact says that a great many landowners are sitting on idle plots — and from there a business appears in which you build not a house but a store, and match the owner with a tenant. It was a redeployment of existing resources that nonetheless uncovered genuinely new demand without competing with housing; that is what makes it deft.

Technical differentiation — a proprietary method allowing wide window openings even in prefabricated construction — combined with the sales innovation of the Convention, and the business grew in territory where the other prefab majors were weak. Begun in 1976 as a single division, the roadside store business handed its framework for connecting idle land, landowners and tenants down to the later development of logistics and commercial facilities. Today the non-residential businesses have grown to a scale comparable with the residential ones. Ishibashi Nobuo had begun sketching, in the 1970s, a structure in which another pillar absorbs the cyclicality of housing — and in seeking so early to escape dependence on a single business, this decision set the template for all the diversification that followed.