Company history

Muraishi Hisaji left Daiwa Bank in 1969 and started Chikuma Real Estate in Edogawa, on the eastern edge of Tokyo — for the first two years just himself and his wife, preparing small parcels of land for housebuilders. The name came from the Chikuma River in Nagano, where he had grown up after losing his father in the war. Colleagues who had also quit big employers joined him, taking pay cuts to do so, and all of them were still there twenty years later. He hired no relatives, no commission salespeople and no industry veterans even in boom years, taking only new graduates from 1980 — a banker’s personnel policy in a trade that ran on commissions.

The 1973 oil shock brought the first real decision. Reading that tighter money would freeze land, Muraishi sold every parcel he held, took inventory to zero, and stopped building houses for sale altogether, living off other work until credit loosened and prices bottomed. He resumed buying in 1975, ahead of competitors, and the years to 1980 became what he called the golden age of the built-for-sale business — but growth was deliberately capped at 20–30% a year.

The structure that still defines the company was assembled between 1975 and 1985. Chikuma Construction (1975) let the brokerage answer a landowner’s question about using his land by building on it. Branches spread station by station along the Tozai subway line from Gyotoku (1977) onward — one office per station, even where two stations were a short walk apart, because covering the line mattered more than the overlap. And in April 1985 a dedicated management company took over rent collection, tenant placement and complaints: construction profit arrives once, Muraishi noted, but management fees arrive every month, and he called this preference for stock income a banker’s way of thinking. Online management of some 6,000 properties began in 1986. Sixteen years after founding, brokerage brought the customer, construction won the order, and management earned for decades.

In July 1987 the group merged its companies and renamed itself Starts — dropping the founder’s personal nostalgia for a name that belonged to everyone — and pushed abroad, opening in Honolulu and Taipei that year and the Gold Coast and California by 1989. By then the “Thincs” business of holding and managing land for Tokyo-area landowners covered ¥1.5–1.8 trillion of assets under management. Starts registered on the over-the-counter market in May 1989.

The listing money funded a decade of adjacent businesses, each hung off the same three-part core. Building materials distribution came in 1995, an internet subsidiary in 1996, a research institute for real-estate consulting the same year. A publishing arm that had begun in 1983 as a magazine for landowners — an attempt, Muraishi wrote, to get closer to the feelings of people who had inherited land from their ancestors — grew into Starts Publishing and the consumer title OZmagazine.

Management kept compounding: about 23,000 units under management by August 1994, generating some ¥1.2 billion of annual fees. Hourly parking (1998) monetised the small parcels the rental business had collected; corporate housing administration (1999) opened a business-to-business channel to sit alongside the individual one.

The most consequential additions were financial. A securities subsidiary in 1999 to sell securitised real-estate products, an asset-management company in 2001 to structure and run REITs, then hotels (2003) and elderly care and childcare (2003). In fifteen years the company had gone from three businesses to nine, each large enough to stand as its own reporting segment — which is precisely what happened next.

In October 2005 Starts split itself apart. Construction, brokerage, condominium sales and corporate services were spun into separate operating subsidiaries and the parent became the pure holding company Starts Corporation — eighteen years after it had merged those same businesses into one. The outward name stayed single; what was divided was profit responsibility.

The same month, Starts Proceed Investment Corporation listed on JASDAQ with the group’s own asset manager running it — six years after the securities subsidiary was founded, the chain now reached from land assembly through construction and management to a listed exit. Building management arrived by acquisition in 2006, giving the group offices as well as apartments, and a trust company in 2009 opened succession planning for wealthy landowners. The vertical integration was, at that point, essentially complete.

Starts moved to the Tokyo Stock Exchange First Section in September 2014, which mattered commercially as much as financially: a business asking landowners to sign twenty-year sublease contracts trades on its own credibility. The year to March 2014 had brought ¥151.0 billion of sales and ¥16.2 billion of ordinary profit, up 18% and 34%. Property management was the largest segment at roughly 39% of sales and construction the second at 31% — the model of proposing a use for the land, building on it, master-leasing the result and then managing it, which distinguished Starts from the larger sublease specialists it competed with.

In April 2016 Isozaki Kazuo became president — the first time in forty-seven years that the founder handed the executive seat to someone else, with Muraishi remaining chairman and group CEO. Segment disclosure was refined into ten reporting units from 2018, separating hotels and leisure from elderly care and childcare so that each growth area could be seen on its own. Sales reached ¥180.8 billion in the year to March 2017 and ¥195.2 billion by March 2019, with a ninth consecutive dividend increase marking the company’s fiftieth anniversary.

The distinctive expansion of these years was into public-private work. A welfare infrastructure fund set up in 2016 financed childcare and elderly facilities in Tokyo, and between 2016 and 2017 the group joined five PFI and PPP projects — town-centre redevelopment in Anjo, public-facility renewal in Narashino, an arts centre in Hirosaki, a station-front complex in Okazaki. Starts did not merely build them; it operated them afterwards, extending the stock-income model it had learned in rental housing into public assets. Further projects followed through 2024, alongside an environmental real-estate fund in 2023.

Overseas, the group moved from brokering for Japanese expatriates to building and running its own assets: a rental factory in a Philippine industrial zone (2016) and Hotel Emion Phnom Penh (2018), the first hotel the group both built and operated abroad. Starts moved to the Prime Market in 2022 and unified its regional subsidiaries under the Starts name. In July 2024 Muraishi Toyotaka, the founder’s eldest son, became president, with Isozaki as vice chairman and Muraishi Hisaji as chairman — the first succession within the founding family, and three generations of leadership sitting side by side. The year to March 2025 brought ¥233.0 billion of sales and ¥24.3 billion of net profit, with 92 group companies and about 630 Pitat House brokerage outlets.