Starts Corporation - Company History

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Financial history 2006–2026 — revenue, cost structure, balance sheet, cash flow and key ratios, year by year →

Founded 1969
Founder Muraishi Hisaji
Founding location 東京都江戸川区
Core business at founding Buying small parcels of developed land and reselling them to housebuilders
Listed 1994
President Muraishi Toyotaka President since 2024 (age 46, as of 2026)
Current priority Recurring revenue · Overseas expansion Building up the number of units under management and running its own operations in Asia
Founding
In 1969 Muraishi Hisaji, having left Daiwa Bank, founded Chikuma Fudosan as a sole proprietorship in Edogawa Ward, Tokyo. For the first two years the work was buying small parcels of developed land and selling them on to builders of ready-built houses, and the business was run by Muraishi and his wife alone. The name comes from the Chikuma River in Nagano Prefecture, where he grew up. Men who had left banks and other large employers joined one after another, the business widened into building and selling the company's own houses, and in September 1972 it was reorganised as a joint-stock company. It hired neither commission-paid salespeople nor people with industry experience, and from 1980 it took on new graduates continuously — a personnel practice unusual in the property industry. In the oil crisis at the end of 1973 it sold every plot it held to take inventory to zero, and halted ready-built housing altogether until land prices had finished falling in 1975.
The Decision
From a single landowner the company arranged to collect a fee three times over — on the brokerage, on the construction and on the management. Reading that the profit on building work comes only once, at completion, while management fees come in every month, Muraishi Hisaji set up Chikuma Kensetsu in August 1975 and Chikuma Kanri Service in April 1985, lining up brokerage, construction and management inside the company. In July 1987 he unified the name as Starts and absorbed the affiliated companies, leaving landowners and tenants a single point of contact. In October 2005 he went the other way, splitting the company to move four businesses into subsidiaries and becoming a holding company, so that responsibility for earnings sat with the business subsidiaries and the parent was left with policy decisions and the allocation of resources. In that same October 2005 it listed Starts Proceed Investment Corporation, which the group manages itself. Gathering the tenants, building, taking the building into management and finally selling it to the group's own investment corporation is a circuit that raised the number of fees collected on each building.
Today
Four-tenths of profit comes not from building but from holding property in management. In the year to March 2026 consolidated revenue was $1.6B (¥252bn) and operating profit $228.9M (¥36bn); of the ten businesses, property management was the largest, with revenue of $648.1M (¥103bn) and profit of $92.3M (¥15bn). Construction, which accounts for three-tenths of revenue, returned profit of only $48.7M (¥8bn), a margin of 10.2 per cent against property management's 14.3 per cent. Sale-and-purchase brokerage, on revenue of $64.5M (¥10bn), earned $26.6M (¥4bn) at the highest margin of all, 41.7 per cent, while the residential development business was left with $505,817 (¥80m) on revenue of $44.3M (¥7bn). The more a business builds and sells, the more its profit swings from period to period; the more it takes buildings into management and collects fees, the more each period's figure can be read in advance.
Competition
Facing the same landowners, Daito Trust Construction leases the building back and Starts takes on its management. Daito Trust leases in bulk the rental housing it builds, absorbing the loss from empty units itself, having established a land-trust system that takes on the vacancy risk as well, and it recorded revenue of $12.5B (¥1.98tn) in the year to March 2026. Starts Corporation stands on the side that collects a fee for taking property into management, and its revenue of $1.6B (¥252bn) is an eighth of that; in exchange its operating margin, at 14.4 per cent, is twice Daito Trust's 6.8 per cent. Rental brokerage runs to about 630 shops including Pitat House franchisees, and from 1987 the company also put its own offices around Asia. Since it does not lease buildings back, what it can increase is the number of units under management and the number of shops, and the pace of growth is set by how far the shop network spreads.

Timeline

1969–1989Quitting Daiwa Bank to start out — the three wheels of brokerage, construction and management, and the Shinks business

  1. 1969Muraishi Hisaji leaves Daiwa Bank and starts Chikuma Fudosan in Edogawa Ward
  2. 1972Chikuma Fudosan incorporated as a joint-stock company
  3. 1975Chikuma Kensetsu established; the company moves into construction
  4. 1975Land buying and ready-built housing resumed ahead of rivals after the zero-inventory halt
  5. 1975Seven established as a restaurant business
  6. 1977First branch opened at Gyotoku
  7. 1980The land-utilisation business begins
  8. 1983Chikuma Shuppan established, later Starts Publishing
  9. 1985Chikuma Kanri Service established as a dedicated management company
  10. 1987Starts International Inc. established in Honolulu, Hawaii
  11. 1987Renamed Starts; Chikuma Kensetsu and other affiliates absorbed
  12. 1989Registered as an over-the-counter issue with the Japan Securities Dealers Association
  13. 1989Woody Home established, later Starts Home

1990–2014The move to a holding company, and the completion of a vertically integrated property value chain

  1. 1995Starts Shoji established for wholesale construction materials
  2. 1996Weave Inc. established; entry into the internet business
  3. 1996Starts Research Institute established for property consulting
  4. 1998Navi Park hourly car park business launched
  5. 1999Entry into staff-housing management agency work for companies
  6. 1999Starts Securities established
  7. 2001Starts Asset Management Investment Trust established for REITs
  8. 2001Starts Publishing registered over the counter with the Japan Securities Dealers Association
  9. 2003Separation into regional subsidiaries begins in the main cities
  10. 2004Listed on the JASDAQ Securities Exchange
  11. 2005Company split; holding-company structure adopted and the parent renamed Starts Corporation
  12. 2005Starts Proceed Investment Corporation lists on JASDAQ
  13. 2006Bridgepoint Japan and others acquired; entry into integrated building management
  14. 2009Starts Trust established; entry into the property trust business
  15. 2011Starts Brasil Real Estate Ltd. established in Sao Paulo
  16. 2014Moved up to the First Section of the Tokyo Stock Exchange

2015–2025Ninety-two group companies and ten thousand people under Isozaki — a run of PFI projects and self-run operations abroad

  1. 2015Starts Small-Amount Short-Term Insurance Preparation established
  2. 2016Starts Welfare-Contribution Infrastructure Fund partnership established
  3. 2016Isozaki Kazuo becomes president and representative director
  4. 2016Starts Rental Factory begins operating in a PEZA estate in the Philippines
  5. 2017Five PFI and PPP projects entered in two years, from Anjo to Higashi-Okazaki
  6. 2018Segment disclosure recast into ten segments
  7. 2018Hotel Emion Phnom Penh begins operating in Cambodia
  8. 2019Fiftieth anniversary; ninth consecutive year of dividend increases
  9. 2022Moved to the TSE Prime Market; Yoshihiro Kikaku acquired
  10. 2023Starts Environmental Property Development Fund partnership established
  11. 2024Starts Environmental Development established
  12. 2024Muraishi Toyotaka becomes president; first succession within the founding family
  13. 2025Pitat House reaches 113 group shops and 518 network shops

Founding Story

1969–1989Quitting Daiwa Bank to start out — the three wheels of brokerage, construction and management, and the Shinks business

In twenty years Starts went from a husband-and-wife business in Edogawa Ward, buying small parcels of land to sell on to housebuilders, to a public company that brokered, built and managed rental property under one roof and held the assets of Tokyo-area landowners in trust. What made that possible was less any single deal than a set of refusals — no commission pay, no experienced hires, no land on the books when prices were about to fall — that left the company able to stop when its rivals could not.

Chikuma Fudosan, run by a husband and wife — comrades who left salaried jobs, and the zero-inventory call in the oil shock

In 1969 Muraishi Hisaji (村石久二), having resigned from Daiwa Bank[1], started Chikuma Fudosan as a sole proprietorship in Edogawa Ward, Tokyo[2]. For the first two years the work was buying small parcels of developed land and selling them on to builders of ready-built houses, and the business was run by Muraishi and his wife alone. The name Chikuma was for his mother and his birthplace: he had grown up beside the Chikuma River in Nagano Prefecture[3], lost his father — who had gone to the front — in the war, and been raised single-handedly by his mother. In September 1972 the firm was reorganised as a joint-stock company to keep pace with the growing business[4], and in July 1973 the head office moved to 3-chome, Ichinoe[5]. This was the start of a small property company in Edogawa Ward whose stated purposes were rental brokerage, sale-and-purchase brokerage and property management.

Soon after the founding, colleagues who had left large employers — banks among them — joined one after another, and the business widened from selling developed land to building and selling the company's own houses. Muraishi had not poached them; they were comrades who had quit their jobs and gathered, prepared for a cut in pay, and as of 1989, twenty years after the founding, every one of them was said to be still with the company[6]. Relatives were not taken on; even in boom years the company hired neither commission-paid salespeople nor people with industry experience; and from 1980 it hired new graduates continuously[7] — a personnel policy that brought a banker's sensibility into a property industry where commission-based selling was unremarkable. The organising principle of the squad of amateurs, which survived for decades, was fixed during this period of arrivals.

The oil shock at the end of 1973 forced the first management decision[8]. Reading that land would stop moving once monetary tightening pushed interest rates up, Muraishi sold every plot the company held, took its purchase inventory to zero, and suspended the ready-built housing business. The judgement was to make do with work other than ready-built housing while waiting for money to loosen and land prices to finish falling. In 1975, ahead of its rivals, the company resumed buying land and building for sale[9], and what followed was the golden age of ready-built housing[10] that lasted until the land-utilisation business began in 1980. Even through this period growth in sales was held to 20–30 per cent a year[11], which Muraishi explained by his creed that persistence is strength[12].

From the Gyotoku branch to every station on the Tozai Line — a branch network, and management as a specialism

In August 1975 Muraishi established Chikuma Kensetsu Co. and moved into construction[13], in order to build a structure in which the enquiries about land utilisation received at the brokerage branches could be answered in-house all the way through to the building work. In 1977 the company opened its first branch, at Gyotoku[14], and in 1979 branches at Narashino and Nishi-Kasai. The head office also moved, in December 1979, to 6-chome, Nishi-Kasai[15], and the branch network began to spread from Edogawa Ward towards Chiba. In this period the company also launched Tsuchi (つち), a magazine for landowners. It was a medium for getting closer to the feelings of people who have inherited land from their ancestors and guard it carefully[16], and this bringing of communications in-house led to the establishment of Chikuma Shuppan Co. in March 1983 — renamed Starts Publishing in October 1989[17] — and on to an independent publishing business including the later OZmagazine.

Once the land-utilisation business began in 1980[18], the opening of branches shifted to a strategy of covering the Tozai Line corridor as an area. The company opened Minami-Gyotoku in 1981, Urayasu in 1985 and Kasai in 1986; even where it was said that a single branch would do for the short distance between Nishi-Kasai and Kasai, it opened at each station in order to lock down the line. Higashi-Funabashi and Sengendai in Saitama Prefecture followed in 1982[19], Matsudo and Adachi in 1983, Makuhari-Hongo in 1984 and Mizuhodai in 1985, and in 1986 it opened a branch at Funabori in Edogawa Ward, where the population had begun to grow with the opening of the Toei Shinjuku Line. The criterion of choosing sites near stations in anticipation of tenant recruitment never varied, and the concentration around the founding ground was still being shown to investors years later as a policy of focusing on Edogawa Ward and Urayasu City[20].

As the number of flats built through land utilisation grew, a structure in which sales staff also handled everything from finding tenants to collecting rent and dealing with complaints could no longer cope. In April 1985 the company established Chikuma Kanri Service Co. — later Starts Amenity — as a firm dedicated to managing rental flats, blocks and car parks[21], and made management a specialism. The profit on construction work comes once, on completion, while management fees accumulate every month. Muraishi called this emphasis on stock income a banker's way of thinking[22]. In 1986, at a point when it had roughly 6,000 properties under management, it began introducing online management[23], and sixteen years after the founding the three-wheel structure was in place: brokerage to create the customer contact, construction to win the order, and management to earn from it over the long run.

Unifying the name as Starts, and the Shinks business — entrusted assets above ¥1trn and an over-the-counter registration

In July 1987 Chikuma Fudosan Co. changed its name to Starts Co. and absorbed affiliated companies including Chikuma Kensetsu Co.[24] It was a reorganisation that gathered the three companies of brokerage, construction and management into one and unified them under the Starts brand. In his book Muraishi looked back on the change as one made at a time when the next stage — from a neighbourhood estate agent to a mid-sized property company — was coming into view, when he wanted to move away from the personal nostalgia invested in the name at the founding and put the feelings of all the members on the company's crest[25]. Eighteen years after the founding, this structure, which for the moment concentrated the pieces of a diversifying business into a single company, also became the premise for the later split into business-line subsidiaries.

Muraishi called the land-utilisation mechanism the Shinks business. The company negotiated individually with landowners across the Tokyo metropolitan area to take on the management of their property, proposed the construction of car parks, flats, convenience stores, commercial buildings and blocks of flats, and after completion took the buildings into its own care and managed them. As of 1989 the assets entrusted to it came to between $10.9B (¥1.5tn) and $13.0B (¥1.8tn)[26], and Muraishi explained that his counterparts were landowners with assets ranging from ¥2–3bn up to ¥40–50bn[27]. A method of accumulating income through long-term relationships of trust rather than by buying land presupposed an organisation whose staff did not leave and could stay with a client for a lifetime, and the policies of hiring new graduates and gathering comrades were the other side of that business model.

Alongside the unification of the name, the company also began to move overseas. In March 1987 it established Starts International Inc. in Honolulu, Hawaii[28], and in November of the same year Seigei Ltd. (星藝有限公司) in Taipei, Taiwan[29]; in January 1989 it added the Gold Coast in Australia and in July of that year California — four countries in two years. The deployment was aimed at Japanese demand for buying property abroad and at demand for staff housing from Japanese companies moving into those markets. In May 1989 Starts was registered as an over-the-counter traded issue with the Japan Securities Dealers Association[30], and in November of that year it established Woody Home Co. — later Starts Home — moving into the individual housing field[31]. Twenty years from the founding, a husband-and-wife business selling developed land had become a public company that held brokerage, construction, management and landowners' asset management in-house, and whose founder said it aims to be a company of 50,000 people in the twenty-first century[32].

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Notes

  1. Asesei: Ase to tomo ni ikiru (汗生 汗とともに生きる), by Muraishi Hisaji and Hisada Kazuko, Starts Publishing, 1994↩
  2. Starts Corporation, annual securities report (有価証券報告書), Directors section↩
  3. Asesei: Ase to tomo ni ikiru (汗生 汗とともに生きる), by Muraishi Hisaji and Hisada Kazuko, Starts Publishing, 1994↩
  4. Starts Corporation, annual securities report (有価証券報告書), Corporate history section↩
  5. Starts Corporation, annual securities report (有価証券報告書), Corporate history section↩
  6. Securities Analysts Journal (証券アナリストジャーナル), September 1989, Securities Analysts Association of Japan↩
  7. Securities Analysts Journal (証券アナリストジャーナル), September 1989, Securities Analysts Association of Japan↩
  8. Asesei: Ase to tomo ni ikiru (汗生 汗とともに生きる), by Muraishi Hisaji and Hisada Kazuko, Starts Publishing, 1994↩
  9. Asesei: Ase to tomo ni ikiru (汗生 汗とともに生きる), by Muraishi Hisaji and Hisada Kazuko, Starts Publishing, 1994↩
  10. Asesei: Ase to tomo ni ikiru (汗生 汗とともに生きる), by Muraishi Hisaji and Hisada Kazuko, Starts Publishing, 1994↩
  11. Securities Analysts Journal (証券アナリストジャーナル), September 1989, Securities Analysts Association of Japan↩
  12. Securities Analysts Journal (証券アナリストジャーナル), September 1989, Securities Analysts Association of Japan↩
  13. Starts Corporation, annual securities report (有価証券報告書), Corporate history section↩
  14. Starts Corporation, annual securities report (有価証券報告書), Corporate history section↩
  15. Starts Corporation, annual securities report (有価証券報告書), Corporate history section↩
  16. Asesei: Ase to tomo ni ikiru (汗生 汗とともに生きる), by Muraishi Hisaji and Hisada Kazuko, Starts Publishing, 1994↩
  17. Starts Corporation, annual securities report (有価証券報告書), Corporate history section↩
  18. Asesei: Ase to tomo ni ikiru (汗生 汗とともに生きる), by Muraishi Hisaji and Hisada Kazuko, Starts Publishing, 1994↩
  19. Starts Corporation, annual securities report (有価証券報告書), Corporate history section↩
  20. Starts Corporation, results briefing for the year to March 2011↩
  21. Starts Corporation, annual securities report (有価証券報告書), Corporate history section↩
  22. Asesei: Ase to tomo ni ikiru (汗生 汗とともに生きる), by Muraishi Hisaji and Hisada Kazuko, Starts Publishing, 1994↩
  23. Asesei: Ase to tomo ni ikiru (汗生 汗とともに生きる), by Muraishi Hisaji and Hisada Kazuko, Starts Publishing, 1994↩
  24. Starts Corporation, annual securities report (有価証券報告書), Corporate history section↩
  25. Asesei: Ase to tomo ni ikiru (汗生 汗とともに生きる), by Muraishi Hisaji and Hisada Kazuko, Starts Publishing, 1994↩
  26. Securities Analysts Journal (証券アナリストジャーナル), September 1989, Securities Analysts Association of Japan↩
  27. Securities Analysts Journal (証券アナリストジャーナル), September 1989, Securities Analysts Association of Japan↩
  28. Starts Corporation, annual securities report (有価証券報告書), Corporate history section↩
  29. Starts Corporation, annual securities report (有価証券報告書), Corporate history section↩
  30. Starts Corporation, annual securities report (有価証券報告書), Corporate history section↩
  31. Starts Corporation, annual securities report (有価証券報告書), Corporate history section↩
  32. Securities Analysts Journal (証券アナリストジャーナル), September 1989, Securities Analysts Association of Japan↩

References & sources

  1. Starts Corporation (annual securities reports), including the corporate-history and directors sections.
  2. Starts Corporation (earnings releases, including the year to March 2019), results briefings (including the year to March 2011), and the 53rd business report.
  3. Asesei: Ase to tomo ni ikiru, by Muraishi Hisaji and Hisada Kazuko, Starts Publishing, September 1994.
  4. Securities Analysts Journal (Securities Analysts Association of Japan), vol. 27 no. 9, September 1989.

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