Company history

The six companies that formed Iida Group had all descended from a single carpentry firm founded in 1967, gone public separately, and spent years bidding against each other for the same suburban land. They were the “power builders,” whose trade was cheap, mass-produced detached houses for people who could not otherwise buy one. Ranked together they were the largest supplier of homes in Japan, and individually each was losing the same margin to the same two costs: land acquisition and building materials. In June 2013 Hajime Construction, Iida Sangyo, Toei Housing, Tact Home, Arnest One and ID Home signed a joint share-transfer agreement, and in November Iida Group Holdings was created in Nishitokyo and listed on the TSE First Section the same day.

The logic was arithmetic. Reduce the number of buyers of land and lumber from six to one and the terms improve without a single extra house being built. What the merger deliberately did not do was dissolve the six: each kept its own corporate identity, brand, sales network and segment accounts, and the holding company took only the shared functions — land sourcing, procurement, hiring. The federal structure preserved the speed of on-site decisions that a fast-turnover volume model depends on, at the price of limiting the synergy to purchasing power. Founder Iida Kazuo became chairman at the formation but died on 29 November 2013, within weeks of it; Mori Kazuhiko took the chair in February 2014, with Nishikawa Yoichi as the first president.

Then came the second move, the one that would define the company. In May 2014 the group bought First Wood, a timber and building-materials trading house — the first step of walking up its own cost structure. Materials run to several million yen per house; owning the flow from log to site beat buying through a contractor or trading company. Alongside it, the group began building a timber-sourcing base in the Russian Far East, whose SPF lumber already framed much of Japanese housing. Revenue went from ¥753.8bn in the year to March 2014 to ¥1.34tn by March 2018, and net profit roughly doubled to ¥69.5bn.

By early 2020 the group was supplying about 46,000 detached houses a year — more homes than any other company in Japan, and a scale that put it in a category apart from both the trading-house developers and the branded housemakers. Nishikawa had framed the business from the start as housing for people locked out of ownership, and paired the price with specification: earthquake resistance at 1.5 times the standard, a housing-performance evaluation certificate on every unit.

The integration kept climbing the cost line. First Plus, acquired in October 2019, brought water heaters, bathrooms and kitchens in-house — another ¥2–3m per house of components. Window frames and materials distribution followed. Then the pandemic pushed demand toward suburban houses at exactly the moment those costs were under control: the year to March 2021 delivered revenue of ¥1.46tn, operating profit of ¥121.3bn and net profit of ¥83.3bn, with an 8.3% operating margin and ROE around 18%.

March 2021 brought both the peak and the handover. Orient was acquired in January to strengthen land sourcing in the Tokyo area; the year to March 2022 set the record — ¥153.3bn of operating profit on an 11.1% margin, with every one of the six segments in double digits. Nishikawa stepped down at the end of his term and vice-president Kanei Masashi took over in April 2021, charged with raising the degree of integration the federation had so far avoided. Mori Kazuhiko retired to honorary chairman, ending the founding family’s role in management.

In January 2022 the group acquired RFP Group — Russia Forest Products (BVI) and eighteen subsidiaries including Dallesprom and ALK, forestry and sawmilling companies in the Russian Far East. It was the terminus of the strategy begun with First Wood: not just buying timber but owning the forest it comes from. Five weeks later Russia invaded Ukraine. Sanctions and Japanese import restrictions followed, and the group found itself holding assets it could neither use as intended nor easily leave. Impairments began in the year to March 2023; operating profit fell to ¥102.3bn.

The following year was worse and the cause was domestic. Material costs, competition for Tokyo-area land, wages and mortgage rates all pressed at once, and the year to March 2024 closed at ¥1.44tn of revenue with operating profit of ¥59.1bn — a 4.1% margin, the group’s first real contraction in ten years, with ID Home posting the first segment loss. Having bought four materials makers, the group discovered that internalizing a process does not abolish the market it is exposed to; it only moves the exposure onto its own books.

The answer has been to promise stability where the business cannot supply it. From 2024 the group adopted a progressive dividend — unusual in volume housebuilding — committing to maintain or raise the payout regardless of earnings, alongside opportunistic buybacks. Margins have recovered to 5.5% and then 6.3%, on ¥1.51tn of revenue, while the group absorbed roughly ¥5bn for an Expo 2025 Osaka pavilion and added goodwill from a US housebuilding acquisition in Houston, Atlanta and Fort Worth. Nishino Hiroshi, who ran the Expo project, became the third president in April 2025 with three problems inherited intact: unwinding Russia, making America pay, and getting the Japanese margin back.