Open House Group - Company History

Open House began in September 1997 as a Shibuya company of a few people with $82,631 (¥10m) of capital, brokering the sale of newly built detached houses; a month later it signed on as a franchisee of Century 21 Japan. The timing looked poor — public housing-loan finance was being wound back and land prices were still falling — and the majors and the big prefabricated housebuilders were walking away from anything whose economics they could not read. Arai Masaaki chose precisely that residue: cramped, triangular, trackside and cemetery-adjacent plots, bought cheaply because nobody was bidding against him.

The selling method mattered as much as the buying. In what the company came to call gensen eigyō — canvassing at source — staff approached passers-by on the street and walked them to the property. Because seven or eight out of ten people moving house choose somewhere near where they already live, Open House concentrated its offices on prominent street corners in the districts it sold in and painted prices across the windows. The method resisted being written into a manual, which is why the large developers never copied it; sticking to conventional timber framing rather than standardized panels gave it a flexibility the prefab makers could not match either.

Then it reversed the usual order of the industry. In February 2001 it began selling houses it had developed itself, and that September bought the builder Soken Build outright — renamed and, by 2006, folded into Open House Development — so that land buying, design, construction and sale all sat inside one company. Most developers hold land and buildings first and work out how to sell them later; Open House had the buyers first and made the product afterwards. In 2012, after fifteen years, it ended the Century 21 franchise to sell under its own name, and moved its registered head office from Shibuya to Marunouchi.

In September 2013, sixteen years after it was founded, Open House listed on the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange with revenue of $993.9M (¥97bn) and net profit of $58.4M (¥6bn). What followed was an unbroken run of higher sales and higher profit every year: revenue reached $2.7B (¥305bn) by FY2017, more than three times the listing year in four years, as the efficiency of street canvassing met the cost control of an in-house construction arm.

Growth by opening more offices had a limit, and in January 2015 the company bought Asakawa Home, a timber-frame housebuilder in Tsukuba with a position in the outer Kanto suburbs; it contributed $176M (¥21bn) of segment revenue in its first year and was renamed Open House Architect in 2016. By then condominiums and income-producing property were each earning double-digit margins alongside the detached-house business, and the four-segment shape that the group still runs on was in place.

In July 2018 Open House paid $247.3M (¥27bn) for Hawk One, a Tokyo-area housebuilder shipping more than 2,000 houses a year — its largest acquisition to that point, taken to 100% by a share exchange in October. Goodwill of only about $20.8M (¥2bn) showed it had bought real assets and real earnings at an honest price. What it had actually bought was time: the offices, staff and tradesmen it would otherwise have spent years recruiting and training.

The mid-term plan “Hop Step 5000,” aiming at $4.6B (¥500bn) of revenue, was cleared a year early — FY2019 revenue was $5.0B (¥540bn) — and the pandemic, far from denting demand, pushed buyers toward suburban houses as remote work spread. FY2020 revenue rose again to $5.4B (¥576bn).

The next purchase took the company outside its home ground for the first time. In May 2020 it took 31.9% of Presance Corporation, the largest supplier of compact condominiums in the Kansai region, whose shareholder base had been shaken when its then president was arrested in a case unrelated to the company’s operations (he was ultimately acquitted in 2023). In January 2021 Open House raised the stake to 64.45% and consolidated it, booking $161.2M (¥18bn) of negative goodwill; group revenue jumped 41% to $7.4B (¥811bn).

In January 2022 the company converted to a pure holding company and took the name Open House Group, leaving detached houses, condominiums, income-producing property, construction and US real estate to run as operating companies while the holding company allocated capital between them. Its stated target — $7.1B (¥1tn) of revenue by the year to September 2023, under a plan whose name translates as “Let’s go, one trillion” — was passed with room to spare at $8.2B (¥1.15tn), with operating profit of $1.0B (¥142bn). In an industry whose top tier descends from the prewar zaibatsu, an independent founded in 1997 had reached the trillion-yen line in twenty-six years.

Scale then came from a rescue. Sanei Architecture Planning, a Tokyo housebuilder shipping over 3,500 houses a year, had seen its banks turn cautious after a regulatory recommendation in June 2023; Open House launched a tender offer that August, took the company private that November and renamed it Meldia in 2024. FY2024 revenue rose to $8.6B (¥1.3tn), but operating profit fell short of the year before — the gap between scale and profitability that absorbing a distressed peer opens up.

From 2025 the emphasis shifted from buying to digesting. In April the group spent $404.9M (¥61bn) taking Presance fully private, judging that a listed subsidiary could not move fast enough; in the year to September 2025 it retired the Meldia segment and folded it into the detached-house business. On 1 October 2025 Arai handed the presidency, after twenty-eight years, to Fukuoka Ryosuke, an internal appointment who had joined in 2002, and stayed on the board as Founder rather than cashing out. FY2025 revenue of $8.9B (¥1.34tn) and operating profit of $974.9M (¥146bn) were records for a twelfth straight year.