“Let’s”: taking development opportunities without owning the land (1980)

A single line drawn through the low-growth years

Treat “Let’s” as one more technique for acquiring sites and the whole picture escapes. Line up the three stages — formalised in 1980, elevated into a company-wide change-of-mindset campaign in 1986, made the core of the beyond-land-ownership policy in 1993 — and a single line emerges, pulling the company toward a business model that does not assume land prices will rise. The theme Tsuboi Azuma had been voicing since just after the first oil shock, escaping dependence on land ownership, was pursued with one set of tools after another, through the tailwind of tax reform and the headwind of the bubble’s collapse. From joint ventures to development contracting to fractionalized products, the means of earning without holding land thickened stage by stage.

That continuity did not break when the presidency passed from Tsuboi to Tanaka Junichiro. If anything, the fact that the same theme carried across a change of leader is what suggests it was a structural choice by the company rather than one man’s notion. In a trade where capital is tied up for a decade at a stretch, the question of how to avoid the risk of holding land on your own books ran straight on into the “asset-light” management that President Iwasa Hiromichi later expressed through securitization and assets under management. “Let’s” can be read as the first implementation of that long search.