Hi, everybody. I'm Scott Callon from Ichigo. Thank you so much for joining. This is, as is right in front of you, the FY 2024 2Q1 corporate presentation. I am joined to my right by Dan Morizaku, who is a Senior Member of Finance Team and our Head of Global IR. Can you say hello?
Hi, everybody. Thank you very much for entering the call.
Starting with page seven, Q1 summary. Stock Earnings are up 44% over last year. Our Stock Earnings to fixed expenses ratio is at 245. That's a good thing. The higher that number, the better it is. As you know, we are structurally profitable. We designed that into the firm after the financial crisis, the growth of these Stock Earnings is really, really good. To be very clear, this is driven primarily by absolutely explosive growth in our hotel business. We took significant damage, certainly on a short-term earnings basis during COVID, where the hotel business went from being spectacularly profitable to spectacularly unprofitable, and now we're racing forward again towards spectacular profitability, which is really important and exciting.
As you see on the page, we've got RevPAR already 28% versus pre-COVID, the hotel business is doing the best it's ever done. We worked very hard to keep our people. You should know there is an industry-wide labor shortage, there's a labor shortage throughout Japan. It's particularly severe in the tourism sector. We protected our employment. It cost us money during COVID, it's meant that we're able to capture the hotel demand that is emerging that is extremely strong. In the asset management business, we've got asset management fees that are linked to NOI.
We're seeing growth both in the office space and, as I said, the hotel spectacular growth in revenue, which is not only in the assets we own within this company, 2337, Ichigo Inc. but also within our hotel REITs, that is extremely contributory towards our earnings. The other thing worth pointing out that we highlight is Ichigo Owners, which is our primarily super prime residential business with very high turnover. It's has an average holding period of only about seven months. It gives a very reduced low-cost kind of provision to asset buyers, meaning we entered a business where other players were taking, we thought, too high margins. We get about a 10%-15% gross margin, this business is growing very, very fast.
We're expanding our sales channels. We launched our third co-ownership asset. I'll talk a little bit later. We launched, we will be launching and actually, I've already begun the sales activity around our second Ichigo Residence Token. I'll talk about that later. There are a lot of things going on there, too. Next page. You can see how things break out across the three main drivers of our business. Sustainable real estate, which is of course, overwhelmingly the biggest driver of our business, asset management, and clean energy. Clean energy is down a little bit because we've got maintenance activity with respect to our wind power plant, our major wind power plant, that's an expected explosive growth in sustainable real estate.
Stock Earnings, that means contractual earnings, what I'm really talking about is rental income, and that's effectively almost entirely a rebound in the hotel space. Asset management reflects both growth in Ichigo Office, both some increase in assets under management there, about 5%, but primarily substantial growth in NOI at Ichigo Office, plus a spectacular growth in NOI at Ichigo Hotel. Because the office REIT is so much bigger than the hotel REIT, the office REIT is a bigger driver of asset management earnings. I'll jump to page 10. Look, we've actually got a ton of material, so I hope today we go fast. Sorry for the technical failure, because the goal was to go fast rather than slow today. I'm gonna jump through pretty quickly.
We tend to have robust Q&A. I hope we're gonna have that again today, so please jump in if you think I've skipped anything or that's important. All-in OP is pretty much flat. Cash EPS is up 23% year-on-year. As you know, we focus on cash, not accounting earnings. The final P reflects the fact that we had a very light quarter from a capital gains perspective, and we will not have a light year. There's a bunch of stuff coming, Q2, Q3, Q4. Despite having hardly any capital gains during the quarter because of the spectacular growth in our Stock Earnings, primarily driven by the rebound in the hotel business, but across the board. I mean, Japan has reopened. Things are really, really good.
The forward outlook is as good as it's ever been. We end up being flat on an all-in OP basis, and cash EPS has actually gone up fairly substantial. Next page. This is how things break out. Asset management, all in operating profit, plus 20%. Sustainable real estate is effectively flat. That's because, as I said earlier, huge growth in Stock Earnings, being offset by a decrease in Flow Earnings. That does not represent what will happen during the full year, but that's what the first quarter looks like. Clean energy down year-on-year primarily because the same maintenance expenses that are one-off. Next page. We're actually jumping into page 13. This is material that we provide on an ongoing basis.
It speaks to kind of structural elements of the business model. I will go quickly through this and may even just skip some pages. You should see on this page that we have an increase in our fixed expenses, from about JPY 8 billion a year to JPY 9 billion a year for the full year forecast. Over half of that is people costs. I mean, we've increased salaries, as we should. There's been some inflation in Japan. This is reflecting kind of a little bit of inflation environment, but primarily us choosing to pay our people more. Page 14, what's worth pointing out here is our all-time record high for Stock Earnings, was basically right around the number on FY 20 22, so fiscal year February 20, 2020.
A little bit higher than that, in the fiscal year 2019, that one that end in February 2019. Our forecast for this year is at a, is about JPY 17 billion. It is quite possible, not only do we beat this year's forecast, but we set a record for Ichigo as a firm in terms of our Stock Earnings. If we were able to declare today, that is done. We would be telling you that today we would be raising our forecast. There is, of course, a significant link. We've got 22% of our assets in hotels. They are a very, very profitable asset class. So we're probably generating, at this point, about a third of our Stock Earnings, within the sustainable real estate business, out of hotels.
What happens with the hotels over the next year is going to be important. If things go as they're going right now, it is quite possible we could break that record earnings. Let's see, let's see if we can do it for all of you. I'll skip through the next couple of pages. 16, the only thing worth pointing out is that it's a small number relative to what we normally do. This shows, you know, we have all these embedded profits in the firm, unrealized gains, and what's the multiple against those gains that we actually get when we realize winnings? We have third-party appraisers who tell us what are the embedded kind of forward earnings look like based on unrealized gains.
We always beat that. We got it, like, a really small number for the first quarter. We don't think that's representative for the full year. It's, anyways, it's basically not statistically significant. We think we end up the year at something that looks like between 1.5 and 2x. Then, 17, very quickly, our economic operating cash flow. It sleeves net, sees net income. We are all about generating the maximum amount of cash for our shareholders over the long term. We use that cash, you know, as well as we can for you, right? We invest for growth. That can mean investing in the business. It can also mean buyback of stock. We didn't make a stock buyback announcement today.
You should fully expect us to be active in the stock as appropriate. There's no signal from not having the announcement today. Turning to page 18, we continue to finance really well. Rates have gone up in Japan. They haven't gone up for us. Yeah, it's still a remarkable time to borrow money and invest on behalf of all of you. I mean, one of the huge advantages of Japan is you can borrow, if you're credit worthy, like Ichigo is, extraordinary amounts of money, fixed, covenant list, covenant light, for long term, we continue to do so.
We think that's important to do that in order to decrease our cost of capital and deliver more value for you as shareholders. Page 19, again, this is kind of update information. We are very active as a firm. You know, we have a significant clean energy business. We are recognized broadly within Japan as being a company that cares and implements in a global best practice way on ESG. We are increasingly able to borrow within ESG frameworks, and these are great. I mean, this is very wonderful terms and conditions. We don't pay more for ESG borrowing, we pay less, and the terms and conditions tend to be better.
The fact that about a third of our ESG loan, our loan for ESG right now, is good, and we expect to do another over time. Next page shows that we are climate positive. We substantially, you know, we have the blue shows how much CO2 generation we do. We have been pushing that very substantial over time. As you can see, the green is our actual production of either via solar wind power plants, how much we contribute to CO2 reduction. You can see that the green bar is much, much higher than the blue bar. Next page shows what we're doing in terms of our own, and this is really about the blue bar on the previous page, converting over to renewable energy.
We're currently at 71% across the firm. We expect to get to 85% this year and 100 by 2025. Again, separate from this, we have all this massive power production. I'll move to page 23. Selective acquisitions and sales. I think we've used this title for, like, the last 10 years. We are selective on acquisitions and sales. We are very careful about where we deploy your capital. Conservative about it. I mean, there's always a margin of safety on acquisitions and attached to a very clear-headed view with how we're going to add value to an asset when we buy it.
On the sales side, we just, you know, you can count on us to run a very, very robust sales process when we sell anything and get the maximum price for genuine net value creation that we have done. We have been net acquirers. As you can see on the page, of about JPY 14 billion, that is almost entirely Ichigo Owners. That business, again, is kind of prime, super prime, residential, brand new, delivered by us to investors running from individuals to, you know, big global institutions who want access to highly secure returns in Japanese real estate. As you know, residential is a very robust and steady and stable asset class in terms of NOI.
You know, people pay the rent, they particularly pay the rent in Japan. So this has been a very strong substitute for it creates yield for a country where there really is no yield. Instead of owning Japanese bonds and cash that offer you effectively nothing, you own resident and real estate that offers you know, substantially more than that. You know, these days, some of that, it looks like something like 3%-4% return. Next page touches a little bit on what's happening in hotels. As you can see, RevPAR is up. I mean, this plunged, so RevPAR is revenue per available room, plunged during COVID, and then now it's rebounding to 60% above pre-COVID.
That's just despite inbound tourism still only recovered to 70% to pre-COVID levels. What we're suggesting is, at some point, you know, Japan is just really, really attractive for tourists. You should all come. I mean, it's spectacularly delicious and friendly and clean and safe, and with no social conflict, and cheap, with the yen is. I think it's pretty straightforward to underwrite to continuing growth in Japanese inbound tourism. Part of that also links to the fact that tourism globally kind of grows faster than GDP. It particularly is. That's particularly the case with economies that are moving up in terms of income levels, which describes a broad amount of Asia.
Japan is close to Asia. It's a great place to come, and it's an affordable place to come, there's a lot of growth here. The next page shows what we're doing in terms of capturing that hotel demand. Three areas that we actually expanded during COVID to position long-term growth. We have a hotel operator called One Five Hotels. We have maintained ambitious occupancy previously and through COVID. That involved pushing down RevPAR hard. We kept the hotels up and running, we kept the employment, and we kept ourselves ready for a rebound at some point, and that rebound has occurred. PROPERA, as you know, is our AI-based hotel revenue management system. Now, we use that internally, and we use it really effectively.
What we haven't delivered upon, for you, yet, and we've got a bunch of work going on there, is more substantial external sales of this, because it's a very powerful revenue management system. I'll touch a little bit on the next page, and with respect to the couple, we will provide for all of you that'll make you happy. We have two Ichigo hotel brands, THE KNOT, which is kind of a higher level of boutique hotel brand, and The OneFive, which is more kind of. It's what's the right way describe it? It's probably budget.
I mean, I hate to use the word budget because the, kind of the soft service and hospitality is really, really good, and that's part of the reason why it's succeeded very well. Both brands are proving to be very effective and powerful for us, both inbound and domestic. Page 26. I think the really only thing here to point to is, you know, we are broadening, diversifying our hotel earnings. We're moving beyond our earnings that are driven by asset ownership, meaning kind of operating income and gains of sales. The hotel operator will turn robustly positive. One Five will return robustly positive this year. We expect to see expanded activity with PROPERA.
Asset management, we there is more to be done there. We will be generating Stock Earnings, these businesses in a non-asset way. Next page, just kind of points to this is what we do as a bread and butter in sustainable real estate. Some examples of the activity that we have had in the retail space. I don't know how many of you know Akihabara, which is a main hub in central Tokyo. Both of these assets are right smack in front of the station. Like, you walk out of the station and boom, right in front of you is are these two buildings, owned by us, like literally feet away. This is what we do. They're older assets, 40 years plus in both cases.
We have spec'd them up to make that sure they are totally earthquakes safe and structural engineering is right for them to run for hundreds of years. During the COVID period, I think, in one of them, let's see, either Sofmap or Bandai Namco, we did 2 summers ago, and the other one we did last year. Massive increase in rents, based on kind of the quality, that we have provided and the superb location. What we do, you will see more examples of this. Very, very powerful in terms of. Look, at the end of the day, these assets have value because of the NOI they do generate.
We are intensely focused on driving a higher NOI in order to create more value for our shareholders or buyers, because that's what we do. We create value, we make them more valuable, we sell them on to recycle the capital for you. Page 28 shows what's going on. It's somewhat busy. We want to show you the timeline over time, Ichigo Owners, where demand is very, very robust. You can see that we've used more conservative assumptions. For this year, we expect to sell about JPY 50 billion last year, generate JPY 4.2 billion of operating profit. That has got a lower gross margin assumption relative to last year, where we did JPY 20 billion, generated JPY 3.5 billion of operating profit.
You know, we've done so well over the years, we just feel like it's probably smarter to underwrite to lower gross margins. We'll see what happens. At any rate, there will be ongoing growth in this business, and we are generating that. You know, we're doing the acquisitions you can see on the bottom in order to fund this growth. Next page shows some of the new initiatives. Both are focused on kind of bringing new owners into real estate. The one on the left is a co-ownership business. Really, it's a little bit of partnership.
Probably the best way of describing it, relative to on the right, I mean, on the left, it does give you actual real estate ownership, so you can get kind of depreciation allowances. It's like, you know, physical ownership of an asset, and we offer diversified small-scale investments for larger individuals and kind of high net worth and captive companies to own a diversified portfolio. On the right side, and I've talked about this before, we are actually doing tokens on the blockchain. This is not, and I said this before, this is asset backed, so it's real. You don't have to kind of believe in the future of Bitcoin.
It is kind of really like a REIT, but it's taking the shape of a token. It's an interesting question as to why people wanna buy this versus buy a REIT on the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and the answer is, you know, they can make whatever the choice they want. It turns out that the buyers of these tokens skew younger, they skew more male, and they skew a lot younger than our REIT shareholders. Effectively, kind of the same, the same product. Do you wanna buy it via token? You know, it's boom, just buy via token.
It gives you this ongoing secure return, just like we offer our investors via our REIT, our REITs. I'll turn to the REITs now. You know, it's our job to support these REITs and grow value for all the REIT shareholders. We believe in asset management and believe asset management is fundamentally about serving the shareholders of those that you have kind of a covenant with. It's a way of saying, anything that we do in the REIT space needs to fit the needs of the REIT shareholders. We will never kind of violate that covenant.
It has meant that, you know, for example, over the years, we have not done public offerings nearly as often as many of our REIT sponsor peers, because we've taken a very spec-skeptical view on whether or not those POs, public offerings, really make sense for the shareholders of the REITs themselves. We do not use REITs as, like, exit vehicles for things that we wouldn't want to own ourselves. Anyway, we've done a bunch on the REITs. This is a long presentation. I'll run forward, but those are our values, and you can continue to count on us to intensively serve the REIT shareholders. You know, at the end of the day, the goal is to be recognized and rewarded for that.
I'll talk a little bit about our returns on each of the office REIT, that kind of support the market coming, understanding, you know, what we do in this space and, and why we're good at it. Next page shows some activity. You know, one of the things we do wanna do is we want to increase alignment between us. If you're going 2337, there's asset manager, these REITs. Doing everything you can to align yourself as a sponsor with the REIT shareholders, we think is very important. One of the ways we have done that is we've actually bought the REITs ourselves. So we are co-owners of the REITs, and it's underscore our commitment to drive shareholder value for the REIT shareholders. We're just like you.
We're, if we don't succeed, it damages us, you know, at the end of the day, we're gonna do our best for REITs, so we wanna show the alignment in a physical way, through ownership. Talk is cheap, that's what we're doing. Page 32 addresses recently, there was a shareholder, Ichigo Office REIT. They called a shareholder meeting to make a large number of proposals. At the end of the day, the Ichigo Office shareholders overwhelmingly voted for Ichigo. That was a positive outcome. It was an opportunity for us to reengage with our shareholders at Ichigo Office REIT, that's what happened.
You know, our hypothesis as to why that happened is really kind of based on what we've done for the shareholders over the years. The next page shows the outperformance of Ichigo Office REIT, and we have just absolutely crushed the market. This is our job. This is why investors trust their life savings or their institutional savings to Ichigo, because we work really, really hard to deliver outstanding performance, and we have definitely done that at Ichigo Office and Ichigo Office shareholders recognize that. Next page shows what's happened with dividend growth, which has also been very high.
For a long period of time, we were the single highest performing REIT in Japan, of all the REITs, in terms of a consecutive years of dividend growth. Unfortunately, that disappeared in 2019. You can run for it. It's pretty hard with, where there is some underlying volatility, NOI, for you to, and this is a distribution vehicle, for you to, like, always grow earnings forever. Anyway, we've done very, very well, and we will continue to do well for our shareholders. Next page shows NAV growth, which is similar. You know, it doesn't move quite as spectacularly as we've been, but there's been a lot of growth there. Turning quickly to the clean energy business, there will be more growth there.
We have a little bit of pushdown this year on, one-off maintenance costs, as I pointed out earlier, particularly with respect to the wind power plant. We've got a pipeline of green biomass and non-FIT solar that's coming, that we think will be very additive, not just to our needs, but to the world. This is about, you know, we are all experiencing. Today, Tokyo is not nearly, has been blazingly hot as it has been in the last couple of days. We're all experiencing globally, you know, enormous, kind of weather turbulence, and kind of trying to get ourselves off fossil fuels in order to address that issue is critically important to the planet. We're deeply involved and are gonna be even more involved.
Final page of the presentation before the appendix. We do have our daily shareholder program, which is in many ways, extraordinary innovative. We offer it to all shareholders, not just for the owners of this company, but to all the shareholders of our REITs. The J.League is back and roaring and opening and that's a much better place to be than a very difficult COVID period. We're giving out all these free tickets to all our shareholders, and it's a happy time. That's what I got. Thank you so much for your patient listening. Apologies for the technical difficulties at the very beginning. I'm happy to take any questions or comments. Again, thank you so much.
If anybody wants to either raise their hand, or wait a minute, somebody already has, and I think it's Greg. Greg, thank you. Are you there?
Hi, Scott. Can you hear me?
Yep. Thank you so much.
Yeah, thank you for your time. I have a couple of questions.
Yes, sir.
Just on the Ichigo Owners, I remember you started the year with your guidance. I think you stated indeed, probably lower gross profit margins.
Yeah. Yeah.
How is that kind of trending versus your initial expectations, would be my first question?
Yeah. Don't have a lot of data for you on that, meaning we haven't done anything really of interest. We're working on some, you know, big transactions. I think, yeah, I think we're gonna, we're gonna hit these numbers. Does that answer your question? You're asking for some input on, you know, how are things tracking, and I don't have an answer for you.
Okay.
Talk, talk next quarter or the quarter after that.
Understood. My second question was, you touched upon salary increase for the staff...
Yeah.
The hotels.
Yeah.
Can you maybe just expand a little bit on that? You know, what was the range, kind of, broadly speaking, of what you did on kind of base, and are you also kind of?
Yeah
-helping out with kind of summer variable bonuses? Or if you had a quarter, that would be great.
It was overwhelmingly focused on the base. As you know, we have a system like most Japanese companies, where you get a base, and then you have a bonus, which is some multiple of your base. By raising everyone's bases, we literally raised the bases of everybody, on average, about 5%, but extraordinarily skewed towards younger staff and lower salaries. The thinking about this was, look, there, Japan is in inflation, experiencing inflation in a way that it hasn't experienced literally in decades, and we need to take care of our people. Greg, to be clear, it was not a decision based on kind of what's happening in the market and where are salaries, and we can do this.
It was just kind of it was exactly that. When you got together as a management team, it was like, wow, some of our younger folks who have, you know, less experience and lower salaries are really experiencing an inflation hit, and we should fix this, and we should fix it for everybody. On average, 5%, but there were people that are much higher than that, and there were. The guys who are paid more were much lower than that, and we just explained, this is what we're doing.
That's great. Thank you. Just third question is on the PROPERA.
Yeah.
...you know, software revenues.
Yeah.
Are you able to kind of, develop that post-COVID? Are you able to get more kind of third-party accounts?
Yeah, yeah. The answer at this point is no. That's a KPI that we've missed. We've got, I'm sucking in. I've been in Japan for most of my life. You can tell from my accent, and Greg knows this, you know, I'm from California, but I've spent most of my life in Japan, so when you hesitate on something, you suck in air. You know, sucking air element is, you know, what should I say on this topic? I mean, we're working on some large transactions, I don't know, if they come through and how soon they come through, this has been an interesting experience of spectacularly and maybe, kind of should we show this, the...
One of the pages that shows kind of, just very, very quickly, the page 26. You know, it says 10%-40% earnings increase PA. I mean, that's the right range. Normally, it's like, more like 20%-30%+ for the hotels that we introduced this system. So those numbers are so big and so powerful, you would expect us to be selling this system like hotcakes. It's been really fascinating to see how difficult the sales process has been with hotel operators. It's like, "Don't you want this? It's like free money." Like, "No, no, we're fine with our current system." It's like, oh, okay.
We've done a bunch of work on, you know, how we work on the sales process, and we implement it for free and all that sort of thing. We'll see if we get some breakthroughs sometime soon, we haven't done nearly as much in this space in terms of the external selling activity. It clearly is a very powerful tool for us to deliver, not only higher NOI from our own hotels, but give us competitive advantage, because we do, when we introduce it, we systematically get higher returns. Anyway, we'll see. Sometime hopefully next year, we'll have an announcement where, like, we've done something really, really big, where extremely, but at the moment, we haven't delivered on it.
To give you some sense of that, growth from last year has been about 20% in terms of external, customers for it. That's a low base, so it's not as if it's not growing at all, but it's not growing nearly enough to satisfy us, or I think satisfy.
Understood. Thank you. One last question: Any update regarding Tradepia, the vacancy rate, please?
Tradepia?
Yeah.
Tradepia is currently at 58% occupancy. It is contracted to be 64 soon. The target for this year is to be 70. I think we hit that. It is the kind of the one, as you know, we own, one big office. It is that, it is that one. It has had a completely different experience from our small and mid-size offices that are running at occupancy, nearly 100%. That is a asset we've had to work quite a bit on. That's where it went down to 58. It actually went down below 50. It's now at 58. It's contracted to go to 64. We think we can get above 70 this year.
Okay, great. Thanks very much, Scott.
Yeah. The only good news on Tradepia is that finally it looks like we've turned the corner. Boy, has that been hard. A reminder that we overwhelmingly prefer the small and mid-size. There's a long story around this, you know, and we actually made the money on the asset and, you know, but it has proved to be far more work than we had expected when we first bought it, because of the COVID experience. Things happen.
Okay. Thanks so much.
Thank you very much. We have a question that's come in by via chat from Michael and out of Sweden. Remote working is a new normal in Europe and the U.S., with only 60%-80% presence on premise. What is the trend in Japan, and how is it impacting each of the office's assets and strategy? Michael, I mean, the Tradepia conversation is a worthy one. Again, that's the only large office building we own. Large office buildings are generally occupied by larger companies. Speaking from our data sense, our data set, it's been that the large companies are slightly more remote.
It's not as the SMEs that occupy our buildings are less remote. The key difference is the large companies are more remote, and they've been therefore pushing back space. We've actually gotten no space pushback. What's the decisions that are being made by our tenants are, and I've talked about this before, so forgive me for reiterating. There's a war for talent in Japan. There's a labor shortage, and particularly the smaller companies who are gonna have possibly less brand, they're actually trying to use office space as a way to attract talent. We, again, we have really good offices, really well located. To be in each of the office means it's gonna be a nice space.
What we're hearing from our tenants is: pre-COVID, we were 100% in the office, now we're only 70%, and we're gonna keep our space. In other words, to give, you know, effectively 50% more space per worker, and that's nice. We'll be able to put in allows. We want to give more space per individual. As you know, office space per individual, per worker in Japan is small anyway, so increasing this to more like global standards or European standards is something that our tenants have chosen to do. The short answer to your question is, going remote has not impacted demand in any way, in any material way in the small and mid-sized offices, which are our bread and butter.
In fact, it has actually been, it appears, to be a demand driver, because one of the things that's happening is the big guys are pushing space back, and they want smaller offices, so they're coming to us. The other reason why you would push a space back is because it's more expensive. To be clear, you know, a larger office building in Tokyo, by the way, it's much more expensive to build larger office buildings. You have to gather all the land. You generally have to pay premiums to some of the owners to get some of the land. It's much more expensive to do the structural engineering to make a building earthquake safe. It's just, you know, far more value for the money to do a small and mid-sized office.
You know, you would normally be paying, and this is the Japanese size, 3.3 square meters , but it's called a tsubo. You know, for you would pay kind of like JPY 30,000 for a tsubo, for reasonable office space in Tokyo, that's larger. In our case, it'd generally be, it's something like JPY 16,000, JPY 18,000. In other words, we're like 40%-50% cheaper. What's happening with the remote work is that people are migrating to our size and our cost point. We actually think the office is really interesting because there's still kind of a bunch of people out there going: "Well, we don't know about office, and how's it gonna turn out?" We have been doing a small number of acquisitions of offices.
Small amount meaning, kind of we also,
as I said before, we're selective on acquisitions and sales, but we think it's an interesting place.
You should expect us to be continuing to be active there. Happy to take Will. We're gonna unmute you. Are you there?
Yeah. Hi, can you hear me?
Yes. Thank you for joining.
Thank you for hosting this. 2 questions. The first is on the RevPAR.
Yeah.
increase 28% over pre-COVID.
Yeah.
Can you explain what were the drivers of that? Was this rebranding, you know, CapEx investment, different, you know, just operational efforts to raise pricing? Just kind of get into what drove this. Of your existing, you know, I guess you said 24% of your current assets are hotel.
Yeah.
Is there room for further expansion, as, you know, these sort of efforts are, you know, ongoing into the next year or two? Can you just give some color there?
Absolutely.
Thanks.
Forgive me, I'm gonna give you a qualitative response because we did a number of things simultaneously, and it's small data rather than big data, so it's hard to tease the two out. I think the two drivers, the biggest driver is PROPERA. We implemented PROPERA, it really, really works. The second one is branding. We have rolled out THE KNOT and The OneFive brands, they've been very, very successful. When I say the branding is about, forgive me, let me walk it way back. I mean, it's a service provision that is valuable and wanted by travelers that we have branded THE KNOT and The OneFive.
Meaning, you know, the classic Japanese hotel, and I've said this before, so please forgive me, is like, you know, it's a box. It's really cheap, or alternatively, you can pay a ton of money for the Four Seasons, and there's really been nothing in the middle. Trying to find something that's more in the middle, where you it's not just a box, and you actually get some soft service, and you get kind of people caring about you. Both THE KNOT and The OneFive brands have really good food. I mean, this is a country that cares about food, and people who come here care about food. There's some elements about, you know, making it a much higher quality experience at still a spectacularly great price.
I mean, you know, JPY 11,000 is less than $100 a night. I mean, this is still really, really good value. I would say it's those two. It's PROPERA, it's also our service offer that has driven this increase. Yes, there's upside. There's no question there's upside.
Great. Thanks. Forgive. Thanks very much. The second question is on what can we expect in terms of AUM growth rates, either in sort of maybe average value?
Yeah.
per year
Yeah.
this year, next year, two years, and office and hotel?
Yeah.
Obviously, the hotel had, you know, some trouble in the most recent PO, so it might be a while before we see one there.
Yeah.
You know, can you give us some maybe color on when we, when that might next be, et cetera? Just on AUM growth generally.
Look, the honest answer is that's hard to say because at the end of the day. I'll, you know, I'll give you the thinking and then, you know, maybe we can come up with something that makes sense. We exist to serve the shareholders, and I think, unfortunately, you know, it's not necessarily the case you can say that about all data sponsors. We need to be able to do to grow, and because these are distribution vehicles, in order to grow, you need to do public offerings. You know, we think it's really, really important to make sure the public offerings grow value for the shareholders. We're highly confident we can do that with the hotel REIT today.
We are actually confident that we can do that with the Office REIT also. The Hotel REIT's easier, and we've got an edge that's a very powerful link to PROPERA and kind of our ability. Hotel business in general, it has poor execution in Japan. Despite Japan in the hospitality area, having the best restaurants on the planet, it doesn't have the best hotels, so there's more to be done there. Look, we have ambitions to grow, and we think we can grow. Can you underwrite the Hotel REIT to double-digit AUM growth on a CAGR? I think so. Yeah.
I mean, because it, the opportunity is available, and it's relatively small, and I would remember, the Office REIT it's harder to pay. I think we'll, it will grow. I mean, we've been growing it primarily through growing value and selling assets and making money and reinvesting those assets and making more money, so it has been driven by primarily organic growth. That's fine. The returns for shareholders, as I pointed out earlier, whatever page that was, have been great, page 33. Yet, you know, we do have investors who say: We want you to be bigger. We want more liquidity. We like what you do.
Could you please get bigger, so we can participate more? We'll see where we can take that. I, yeah, I think the most definitive version I can give you is we haven't grown either of these vehicles very much for years, and they will start to grow. That will be a change. It's also a firm priority to grow them. We believe in the asset management business. We believe in serving the world. By the way, when there wasn't inflation in Japan, you had money in the bank, it wasn't a problem in terms of loss of kind of destruction of value, economic value for a saver. Now that we have inflation in Japan, it is a real problem.
For us to deliver what we can in terms of robust returns for Japan savers through our REITs, is something that I think has significant social importance, and we want to grow it. Yes, I think, yeah, you can underwrite hotel REIT to double-digit growth per annum. It's harder for me to say what the office will look like, but we'll get some growth there, too. Is that sufficiently...
That's good.
Is that okay?
That's very good.
I did my best, Will.
No, that's good. Thank you. I said, too, but if you don't... Can I do one more?
Yeah.
On the renewables, I think it was last quarter, you mentioned that you might pursue a strategy of-.
Yeah
accepting outside capital and then developing the asset on behalf of the investor, rather than, you know, owning the assets yourselves.
Yeah.
This was a bit of a hybrid, asset-light model.
Yeah.
Can you, maybe update us on where that's going and what we might see, going forward in that business model?
We're really interested in that. I don't know if people noticed, but we made a very senior hire recently, Akira Yamauchi, who ran Daiwa's asset management business and ran the sustainable asset businesses. He has very significant, and he joined us as Vice Chairman actually in the last few months. He has very significant experience, both on the asset management side and the clean energy side. If you're trying to get some sense of priorities indicatively what the hiring that we're doing at a very senior level, that would give you. But I think we're being responsive both on your asset management question on this one. We'll see where we can go.
But yeah, there is a wall of demand for clean energy, and we are a strong provider in this. This is a business we want to grow more. I mean, the growth has been okay, but I try to be pretty transparent. I wish we had done more, and we still want to do more. We clearly have an opportunity to do more. You will see accelerated growth in this area. I feel pretty comfortable in stating that as the forward direction for the company.
Thanks, Scott. That's good. That's good for me.
Thanks. All right, we're going to call it a day. Thank you, everybody, so much. It's an honor and a privilege to work for all you.