Moving into subleasing corporate housing (2002)

The business of taking the name on the contract

What was new in this judgment was not the discovery of a market but the rewriting of the name on the contract into its own. In caretaking, the company remained the landlord’s agent and its income was a fee per property. In subleasing, it becomes the tenant itself, taking on the vacancy periods and the cost of restoring the property. What the company pays for is having that trouble put outside. The handling — hearing out work that HR departments carry but cannot process, and turning it into a product — was the same as with the benefits club in 1993.

The trouble taken on came back as difficulty in management. A single sublease contract straddling a fiscal period produced the first decline in operating profit since listing. It was the result of unit numbers growing while the reporting system still delivered monthly figures at the end of the following month, and it was the first thing Saito Naofumi, brought in from outside as president, pointed to. A company that began by looking after empty houses now leases 278,000 units of company housing itself, as of the end of March 2025, and rents them to corporations.