The real estate rental business is like raising children and putting them out in the world

I was at my wit's end with a large amount of debt and went to see the three remaining old apartments with my own eyes for the first time. They were one five-story RC apartment building (45 units), one three-story RC building (15 units), and one six-story RC apartment building (30 units), all already over 30 years old. all three apartments were within a five-minute walk of the nearest subway station, and at first glance did not appear to be rental properties with low occupancy rates. However, once inside, the paint on the walls was peeling, the common-area corridors were covered in dust, and the garden plants were unkempt and in disrepair. Then I entered a vacant room with no occupants, and there it was, a Japanese residence from the 1960s. It would have been fine if it were an old, tasteful Japanese house, but it was just an old dingy room that made me feel down. The kitchen, toilets, and bathrooms, which should have refreshed tenant's feelings, were far from "comfortable spaces" with rust and water stains that had been neglected for many years.

Other apartments were in similar conditions, and the overall occupancy rate at the time was less than 60%. I knew nothing about the real estate leasing business at the time, and I wanted to sell the property at a high price and use the money to reduce my debt as much as possible, but it was difficult to sell the property in a short period of time because of the huge cost of demolishing RC buildings and the stagnant real estate market after the bursting of the real estate bubble. I had no choice.

I had no choice but to start managing these "three troublesome apartments. My company, saddled with debt, had no money to rebuild or remodel the old apartments and could no longer obtain bank financing. Most of the employees had already quit, pessimistic about the company's future, but the staff at the computer store and a few old employees who stayed on started cleaning the apartments and repainting the exterior walls. We also expanded our media to attract customers by registering properties with nationwide real estate brokerage chains, as tenant recruitment had until then been left exclusively to local real estate agencies with which we had been in contact since my grandfather's time.

In 1990, the Internet was not yet widespread in Japan, and we began our "condominium renovation" one room at a time, reading and studying architectural magazines. First, we used a concrete hammer to break down and remove all interior components and partition blocks, leaving the building in a skeleton state. By breaking down the rooms, we discovered piping and wiring that differed from the drawings and gained a better understanding of the building's structure. We then drew up rough design drawings in Illustrator and procured materials by purchasing building materials at a home center or by visiting building materials trading companies in town to purchase scrap lumber at low prices.

It took an amateur in remodeling and construction six months to build the first room in a "two-bedroom rental property. It took a considerable amount of time through trial and error, but because we only needed materials, we were able to "rehabilitate" the room for about 1/4 of the price of ordering remodeling from a contractor.

When we put the room on the rental market, we found a tenant within two weeks. I felt as if I had sent a child I had worked so hard to raise out into the world.