Hi, everybody. It's Scott Callon from Ichigo. Thank you very much for joining us for our FY 2023-2 Q1 corporate presentation. I'm joined by Dan Morisaku, who's a senior member of our global finance team and the head of global IR for us. Let's jump into it. I'm gonna start on page. Let's see. I've got paper in front of me too. I'm both analog and digital today. Hopefully, I need to get digital first. Page eight shows the Q1 summary. Look, it's an incredibly difficult world out there. It's, I think it's probably a strength of the firm that in the large extent it's not relevant to us. You know, we just kinda run forward. Q1 was no positive or negative surprises, just kind of basically right on track.
The key elements that are on the page right here are, we have been excelling at acquisition of our sustainable real estate assets in both our multi-asset and our Ichigo Owners business. The hotel recovery is well underway. You can also see though how crushing the COVID impact has been, right? Year-on-year RevPAR, so that's revenue per available room, so a broad indicator of how productive our hotels are 81% year-on-year. Despite that huge rebound, it's negative 43% versus pre-COVID. There's a lot still to go. We are robustly climate positive.
Our CO2 reductions, meaning we have a very significant, as you know, clean energy business that produces, you know, clean energy with no CO2 emissions, and therefore those and substituting for CO2-creating fuels, we have substantial reductions, and they're well above our own emissions. We're also doing quite a bit of work to take down our emissions by transitioning in the so-called RE100 process to go 100% renewable energy by 2025. We've had six consecutive years of share buybacks. The total amount to JPY 1.5 billion or 8.4% of shares outstanding. That included a Q1 buyback that we did just over the last three months. Let's go to the next page. This is kind of information we provide on an ongoing basis.
We have experienced a significant COVID impact. We continue to experience it primarily in the hotel business. It's showing up in Sustainable Real Estate. We've gotten that, but on a year-on-year, we've gone down in terms of our stock earnings. So those are ongoing, kind of, you know, fixed earnings. Fixed is less fixed during a period of massive change, but these are very, very stable earnings. What's happened here is this primarily an Odaiba effect. As you know, we have one large office asset. Our experience has been that we only have one large office asset. Everything else we own is small and midsize office. Small and midsize office has performed extraordinarily well. The one big office we've had is continuing experiencing significant vacancy. It's running at about 56% occupancy right now.
That's pushing down our stock earnings and Sustainable Real Estate. Asset management is down a little bit year-on-year. That's just kind of some fluctuations, and Clean Energy is flat. Go to the next page. As you know, we've introduced all-in expense disclosure to increase our earnings transparency. The issue that we need to solve for you to give you more transparency on our Sustainable Real Estate business is that we have proactively used the tax shield of depreciation by moving our Sustainable Real Estate assets as much as possible into fixed asset category. That's an accounting category and a tax category. Doesn't change anything that we're doing in terms of adding value to those assets.
What it does mean is, if you have those assets sitting in real estate for sale, you don't get the depreciation allowance that pushes down your taxable earnings. We move them into fixed assets. It gives us this tax shield. The result of that, however, is that when you do sales on these assets, they show up as extraordinary gains rather than in operating profits. In fact, this is our core operating activity, and nothing has changed. It's confusing to look only at OP in our case because you're missing this huge contribution from our activity in the Sustainable Real Estate business. Turning to the next page, you can see we show not only OP, but we show all-in OP and recurring profit, RP, and all-in recurring profit, just to give you more visibility.
The numbers are down on OP and all-in OP about 14% year-on-year. That doesn't really matter. That's just this quarter-to-quarter volatility. Net income and cash EPS are down about 1%. Again, the same. It's probably most important to look at this page. As you can see, we do everything we can to preserve our and growth cash flow. As you can see, our cash and net income is nearly twice what our stated accounting net income is, and that's the better indicator of how productive the business is. I mentioned we've done extensive buybacks. We will continue to do so.
You know, the productivity that is generated for all of you as the shareholders for our cash returns are gonna be delivered back to you with growth, EPS growth, either through growing the top line, meaning, I suppose I should say the bottom line, growing earnings or shrinking our shares outstanding. Page 12 shows the segment earnings details. A little bit of a sloppy and muddy quarter because none of this looks particularly good. I mean, Asset Management's down 9%, year-on-year. Sustainable Real Estate's down 15%. Clean Energy's down 11%. The Clean Energy is just kind of bad weather in some of our biggest assets. We've had.
This is March and May, we've had, like, extraordinarily good weather in June, meaning no rain, which is perhaps not good weather, except when you're running a solar business and no rain is, like, really good. This is all back. Asset management will come back, and we expect to see in Sustainable Real Estate SRU coming back also. Turning to kind of the key elements of the business model. I'll go briefly over this, cause it's something we talk about on an ongoing basis, but it's important. Page 14 shows that we're a hybrid business. We have both stock, very stable, earnings on top of that, we embed floor earnings. Page 15 shows what's happened with our stock earnings over time.
As you can see, the green is the Clean Energy business that continues to grow. The major impacts we've experienced have been the Sustainable Real Estate. That's both a function of getting kind of absolutely crushed in the quarter of our assets with hotels that have gone from being robustly profitable to money losing over the COVID period, and a decrease in buy-sell activity as kind of markets locked up. The good news is the markets are clearly coming back in a very big way in terms of buy-sell activity, which is really good for us, predictive of increased forward earnings. Page 16 shows embedded forward earnings. This is what third-party appraisal says are the unrealized gains on our balance sheet. We have stated shareholder equity of about JPY 98 billion.
The third-party appraisers say we have another JPY 65 billion on top of that. Turn to the next page. You can see, in fact, in general, we get more than twice that. When we actually sell assets, we get twice what the appraisal or more than twice the appraisal value. It's a way of saying at this point, the company's trading at a substantial discount to NAV, despite kind of the ongoing productive business. I will point out that very unusually and probably not to be repeated, in the first quarter, we had our actual gains on sales coming right in at appraisal value. We sold an asset in Ginza, which is like super prime retail. Given it's super prime retail, the appraisers feel comfortable giving the super high valuation.
We actually bought it. We actually made substantial returns on this asset. We bought it at a 20% discount to appraisal value and sold it at appraisal value, so that's why you get the 1x. Going forward, you should expect kind of a 2x, 3x return from us on our Sustainable Real Estate activity. Page 18 shows again the focus on robust cash generation. We consistently deliver kind of 2x our stated net income in terms of economic operating cash flow. 19 is what's happening with our financing. Rates have gone up everywhere in the world fairly dramatically, not nearly as much as inflation, of course, and not in Japan, and certainly not for us.
We continue to finance below 100 basis points. We've taken in the duration of our debt, in part because Owners, each of the Owners, which is a kind of a less than one year holding period business, is an increasing part of what we do. You don't need 10-year debt against kind of a seven -month hold. Six years of debt is more than enough. We continue to borrow very, very long term, in order to make sure that we don't have any problems with being able to ride out any negative market environment. I'll turn to page 21, where we speak to kind of our where we're in terms of being climate positive.
As you can see, we continue to grow our solar and wind production, which are non-CO2 emissive. That means that we're replacing CO2 emissions. That shows up in the green bar as our CO2 reductions. At the same time, we're tackling our own CO2 emissions, both by increasing the share of renewables, which I'll turn to on the next page, and increasing our energy efficiency. So, we at this point have CO2 reductions at 2.5x on emissions, and that's structural and will remain that way. Page 22 in front of you shows our current renewable energy ratio, which we expect to get to 70% this fiscal year, and that's up from 53% -6 0%, 70%, just in the first quarter.
I'll turn to page 24, which shows what's going on in terms of buy/sell activity in our Sustainable Real Estate business. Probably the most important thing, the point here. Well, there are a couple things that are going on that are very, very positive. One of them is that we have gotten better at acquisitions. We have under acquired. I mean, this is a business. The Sustainable Real Estate business is a turnover business. We buy assets. We add value to them. We sell them at a higher value because we have genuinely added value to them. We need to buy assets. We've been under acquiring. Acquisitions are back to being far more robust.
We've got kind of just gotten, I don't know how to describe it, better execution. I mean, we've recognized this is an issue. We've put more people on it. We're acquiring assets in a more substantial way, and that's really important. In addition to our acquisitions coming back, the Sustainable Real Estate engine is back on, which is really important for us, cause as you can see from the earlier slides, the drop-off that we experienced under COVID has primarily been the Sustainable Real Estate business. In addition to acquisitions, you know, the selling environment is just really good.
It continues to be a situation that is much easier to sell assets than to buy assets. Part of that's driven by replacement costs. Japan is experiencing very, very substantial construction inflation, of magnitude 20%-30% over the last year. What that means is, you know, what's the value of an asset? Well, if you can rebuild it at a lower price, then the asset is not as valuable as kind of what the new activity could be. Replacement cost is really important. The reason why real estate tends to go up in value globally is because replacement costs, because other countries have inflation and replacement cost goes up year after year. Japan is not experiencing broad-based inflation, nearly the same as kind of much of the G7.
In the real estate space, in the construction space, it's been very extreme. The implication of that is, existing buildings are more valuable, and they're a lot more valuable. We've got all these assets. I pointed to our embedded gains, unrealized gains on our balance sheet. Those have gone up. The sales environment is really very robust. It's getting harder to make economics work, to buy raw land and put up new buildings because the numbers don't nearly work as well as buying an existing asset. Again, that is very positive to us. The other thing is that we're seeing more global activity, investors buying Japanese real estate, and that we expect to see that expanding.
I mean, three things are going on with respect to global investors. One, for two years, they haven't been able to come to Japan, so anybody who wants to do genuine due diligence and look at an asset and have discussions and understand tenants and talk to leasing agents has not been able to come to Japan. So, there's effect pent-up demand as Japan has opened up to business travel again. We have all these real estate investors showing up saying, "Okay, we wanna look at assets." The second thing that's going on is particularly seeing this with Asian-based investors who are taking a view on the yen. The yen has dropped 17% year- to- date. It's just. It was just trading at 139.
Maybe it has moved since it moves a lot since I started speaking. Asian investors who are very familiar with both currency volatility and have certain flight to safety needs in certain cases are finding Japanese assets very, very interesting right now. Despite the fact that they're buying a yen asset and NOI is in yen, they're taking a view of the yen at 139 is very good value. The third thing that's going on is primarily with U.S. investors. Because the yen has depreciated, if you had, for example, a $300 million budget, you wanna do something in Japanese real estate, that's suddenly become JPY 40 billion rather than JPY 30 billion, so there's a lot more money sloshing around for U.S. investors in order to buy assets.
All as a way of saying, we expect to see a significant increase in global activity, certainly with us, and probably more broadly in the Japanese real estate market. Turn to page 25. That speaks to what's going on with Ichigo Owners. Again, to remind you, Ichigo Owners specializes in effectively super prime, brand new residential assets, overwhelmingly located in central Tokyo, in certain cases, very prime areas that are also overwhelmingly in Tokyo. And that business continues to go very well. Acquisitions are going well. We expect we're gonna do a lot more in this business this year than we did last year.
You'll see some kind of, you know, as is the case every year, you'll see selling activity with substantial capital gains in this business this year. In the first quarter, we made nothing in this business, so that's a way of telling you that more earnings are coming at you. Page 26. We acquired kind of through a rolling kind of acquisition with a full consolidation as a subsidiary next year a company called Cost Science. It's an IT consulting firm. It has significant data analysis capabilities. And it just won a Japanese government DX award, DX being digital transformation. It's working. You know, it's got most of its business is dealing with external clients.
It's also working in terms of driving our business forward. There's an example on the page of an actual application where, with Cost Science, we developed an AI-based demand forecast system that is being used by this incredibly famous sushi restaurant to decrease, you know, loss opportunities, sales opportunities, decrease food waste, etcetera. We do actually have significant internal capabilities in advanced IT, and as you know, we're deploying them across the firm, and that includes Cost Science. Page 27. We have three different listed entities other than 2337 Ichigo Inc. One of them is an office REIT, one of them is a hotel REIT, one of them is Ichigo Green, and we're working to support their growth.
On the next page, you can see that acquisition activity is also picking up at the REITs. Ichigo Office is doing an acquisition that closes next quarter. Ichigo Hotel is doing an acquisition that closes next quarter. You know, it's interesting. I mean, across the firm, including our REITs, we focus on small and mid-size assets because it's an inefficient market. We think actually the NOI tends to be far more durable in these assets. They don't kind of go all over the place. They're not bid to the moon, and they're not crushed to the earth. They offer really, really good value in terms of high NOI relative to so kind of you know, high, high cap rates. And, you know, it gives you a diversified portfolio.
The other thing, of course, it gives you the ability to lean in and use kind of significant capabilities we have as a firm. In small and mid-size assets, it's not always the case that you have kind of very capable owners running these assets. You know, we're back to acquisitions in both these REITs and we think and that was directly linked to kind of the ability to generate higher AM asset management fees going forward. Turning to page 29 and the Clean Energy business. It's a business that has continued to grow very, very well. It's not on the page, but the next step is we're doing local green biomass, and we expect to begin activity on that within the next year.
We expect to have three new plants online this year, and two of them are already online. Page 30 shows our share buyback activity over the last six years. We've done buyback six years in a row. That is kind of an essential element of our long-term vision, Ichigo 2030. We're gonna use share buybacks if we think that the shares are good value and should be bought in for all of you. We did a buyback this year. You know, there's no material non-public information here. We expect to continue to be active. That's kind of the statement; that's our capital policy. We think the shares are cheap. You know, we expect to be more active.
Page 31 just reminds all of you of our daily shareholder program, which is unique in Japan, where for our shareholders not only of Ichigo Inc. Owners, but also of all of our REITs, center-listed solar power producers, giving the opportunity to go to [J.League] . That is the prepared presentation. Thank you so much. We'll now turn to Q&A. Greg, you're always first.
Hi. Hi, Scott. Can you hear me?
Yes. Thank you so much for always being first.
Thank you very much for presenting. Yeah, my question was regarding the hotel business.
Yeah.
In the last quarter, we were talking about how the situation, you know, is improving a little bit.
Yeah.
in some of the transaction side.
Yeah.
Obviously, this is about 25% of your portfolio.
Yeah.
What are your thoughts regarding kind of monetization?
Yeah.
For some of those assets.
Yeah.
Going forward?
That's the one thing that's gone wrong in the last kind of literally 30 days. I bought into kind of a structural phenomenon which is really, really positive for us, which is construction inflation. We're along that in all these assets. Our Sustainable Real Estate business is very light on construction activity. I mean, we try to do as little as we can to an asset to improve it. That's really positive. The one thing that's negative that's happened in the last 30 days is directly COVID related, Greg, which is at some point I mean two things have happened. The yen has weakened, and that has meant Japan becomes even more attractive for inbound tourists.
Taking a slightly longer view to the extent the yen stays weak, that's positive for hotels. We've had this thing where it's like COVID is down. Oh, lots of people wanna bid up for our hotels. COVID is up. No, wait a minute. We're gonna wait and watch for a little bit. You know, clearly, quite honestly, in the last 30 days, we've seen the slowdown of people like, "actually, we're gonna wait and see." I think really, what that implies is we've got more volatility, kind of. You know, we took a very conservative view on what we would be able to do in hotels, because that's kind of who we are.
With some kind of hope that kind of the global and Japan, including Japan, COVID economic and social reopening would be really good for our hotel assets in terms of the buy/sell activity. At this point, it's hard to say. It's a way of saying we do need to see kind of a lightening of COVID cases in Japan for us to do a lot of activity. I mean, we sold some assets and we'll probably sell some more. That has been the one disappointment in terms of the activity in the last three months is the explosion of COVID cases in Japan.
Understood. Thank you. Maybe a separate question, if I could, on the solar business.
Yeah.
As you've seen, there's been like a take private for one of the.
Yeah.
There's a proposal to take private for one of the listed infrastructure
Yeah.
REIT. There's been, I think, a counter proposal from,
Yeah.
Canadian Solar.
Yeah.
I mean, generally speaking, are you guys seeing more interest in Japan for those assets? Are these kinds of transaction proposals kind of rekindle the appetite for scale in.
Yeah.
In that segment? Thank you.
Well, I mean, broadly, we're kind of operating in, you know, it's a really terrible time in the world right now. You know, it's a devastating war and humanitarian crisis in Europe. COVID is still everywhere. Inflation is deeply impacting, you know, people everywhere in the world. You know, the truth of the matter is that the war in Ukraine and inflation are positive for kind of renewable energy assets that are not experiencing. I mean, you know, we're not using fossil fuels, so the fact that oil is where it is, or natural gas or LNG are where they are is not relevant to them. These assets have become more valuable.
They become more valuable from a geopolitical and geo-strategic perspective, because Japan is, as you know, massively dependent on imported fuels. Trying to do more in Japan is valuable too. That transaction actually cleared. Canadian Solar lost. Yeah, we expect there'll be more there and we think we have, you know, a lot of value. Did that answer your question?
Yes. Thank you.
Thank you. Happy to take more questions, comments of any sort. Garrett.
Hi. Good evening.
Good evening. Thanks so much for joining.
Thank you. You have a slide that shows the weighted average remaining loan maturity has declined from 9.6 years.
Yeah.
in fiscal 2017 to six and a half years today.
Yeah. Yeah.
Given the dramatic increase in interest rates around the world and the threat that this poses to the valuations of low cap rate assets, would you consider significantly extending the duration of your fixed rate borrowings, potentially through the purchase of derivatives?
Thank you, Garrett. That's a super important topic. We actually have macro hedges already on our portfolio to take out interest rate risk. That at this point covers over half the portfolio. It's kind of gone down a little bit over the last six months. In fact, Dan, I may need your help on this one. What percentage of our total portfolio is fixed at this point, if you know? You can jump in if you know the answer. I mean, six and a half years is plenty long enough.
We try to be really smart about this. I mean, to the extent that we can borrow for 50 years for free, we'll borrow for 50 years for free. The reason why we pushed it down from 9.6- six and a half over the last number of years is one, because, you know, six and a half years is literally six years longer than our holding period for our HLRS assets. The other reason to do it is because you get just so much better kind of terms and conditions. People start wrapping all sorts of covenants on you when you go longer on that.
If I can read into your question, which is, you know, you should be smart about this and think about doing more, and we completely agree with you. You can count on us to be pretty proactive in trying to take out interest rate risk, covenant risk, you know, diversify our lending pool, and fix up our interest rates. All those things are super important. The goal is to make your debt look as much as possible like equity. Instead of having an equity capital charge of whatever, you know, 6% or 10%, 8%, you're running a debt that costs you 90 basis points. It looks a lot like equity.
Dan, do you have an answer on percentage that were fixed?
Approximately 52%.
Okay.
Yeah.
Which has come in, and I wanna raise that back up.
Okay. You mentioned, like, the holding period isn't supposed to be long, but, you know, the Bank of Japan now is printing money to peg the interest rate at an artificially low level.
Mm-hmm.
You know, it's not impossible that there could be a dramatic rise in, you know, a six-month period like we've seen here in the rest of the world. You know, you're buying a cap rate, you know, an asset with a cap rate at, like, 2% or 3%, and then interest rates move up, like, 2% in a six-month period. It seems like that could be potentially an issue.
Yeah. Garrett, I mean, again, I completely agree. And it's worth pointing out that that's part of the reason why we do one-off assets. We don't do, like, super trophy assets. Garrett, we don't buy assets at 2%-3% cap rates.
Okay.
We're generally buying at 4%-5% right now. That gives you 300 to generally kind of 300-450 basis points cover on your cost of funding. That's super important. You know, you're exactly right. You know, the problem with people kind of, you know, in the markets, people find at 5% they buy assets that cost 3%, and they're like, "We're gonna make it up on inflation and rental growth." If it works out that way, great, but if it doesn't work out, then you're underwater, and you're gonna die. For us, two things are really important.
A significant gap between our funding and the current running yield on the asset. Two, the fact that we add value to it. What we're doing, Garrett, is we're buying assets that yield 4.5 and we're adding kind of 50-100 basis points of yield on top of it. And that also gives you protection against kind of you know rates going up. Now, the other thing that's worth pointing out is in a rising rate environment, it you know it depends on what's happening with kind of broad inflation and construction inflation in particular. If rising rates are accompanied with inflation, then we're gonna get the benefit of that.
You know, the biggest risk is a stagflation risk or kind of a differential inflation where we're effectively kind of interest rate rise only, and it doesn't pass through to kind of economics of our assets. Yeah, agree with you. This is super important. Our company almost died during the Lehman Brothers, the GFC kind of way back then because we had our rate, you know, the duration of our debt was too short. We were buying at very low cap rates. We were financing higher. We didn't really have a value add capability. It was more we think we're gonna flip the next company, so we completely reworked the firm. Agree on your points. This is something we're very careful about, and we'll continue to be so.
All right. Thank you.
Thank you. I will wait for a second. Oh, John, thank you very much for joining. Yeah, go ahead.
Hello. Hi. Yeah, thanks for setting up the call. I just have a quick question regarding the buy/sell market. You mentioned that,
Yeah.
It has come back strongly. In which other classes are you seeing this positive trend within?
Yeah. Look, residential's extraordinarily strong. That's core assets. Retail is, you know, also doing well. You know, hotels continue to be deeply impacted. But in general, the phenomenon that we're experiencing is kind of significant. It's a seller's market. Continues to be a seller's market. But the obvious one that we're involved in, logistics is kind of the supply-demand situation, and what we're not very involved in has loosened. It's still kind of more demand than supply, but a lot of supply coming on. That market has kind of slowed down somewhat in terms of buy-sell activity, and certainly the massive bid for logistics assets. But the really obvious one is resi. Japan has protected, you know, wage incomes very well.
There's a labor shortage, wages are going up. You know, residential is just a very durable asset. In Japan, you know, to the point just raised by Garrett, you know, Japan, the BOJ, the other thing that's happened in the last three months is the BOJ has doubled down on we see we have an inflation outlook we don't think is durable. This is temporary. Japan has not broken out of deflation, the BOJ has doubled down on staying loose. In that context, I'm trying to own an asset with a decent yield is important. The other thing we see is a lot of the global investors are interested in resi and residential also.
It's just a nice, durable Japanese asset with an obvious economic stream attached to it. So, resi is really well bid.
Understood. In the current environment, just in case anything was to change, say if the Bank of Japan was to let yields rise.
Yeah.
Do you see a need to accelerate your buy-sell activity before that window of opportunity closes? In that regard, if we look at your targets for the Sustainable Real Estate, at what point within that range do you expect us to fall in by the end of the fiscal year?
I mean, we're very comfortable we're gonna hit our numbers. That's because we have visibility on our transactions. I mean, look, you know, the way we think about the world is we're not in the prediction business. You know, we're not people like, the yen's at 139, we think it's going back to 115, or the yen's going to 159. I mean, maybe. What we do is we run scenarios around kind of what could happen. The yen could go 160, the yen could go 100. By the way, you know, the yen movement is since we're effectively a domestic firm, isn't super relevant to us.
Although, as I pointed out, there are some knock-on effects, it appears to be the case that the weak yen is making it attractive for certain global investors, finding the yen more attractive. The real issue is the one that Garrett just pointed to, which is interest rates, and how interest rates interact with the NOIs on our assets. That's why we have you know run with kind of long-term debt fixed you know very effectively no covenants to speak of. That's really important to us. Keeping over half of our debt fixed and in fact we really target something that looks more like 70% of our debt being fixed is important to us.
We've gotten a little bit light on that, and we wanna push it back up. Yeah, I mean, if rates go to 3%, they go to 3%. You know, that's what's so important about having a margin of safety. We are, you know, it may be out of favor, but we are value guys. You know, the issue with owning assets that yield 4% and you're funding at 3%, if rates go up, if rates double, if they go up 300 basis points, you've just become 200 basis points underwater.
When you own assets that you buy at 4.5, and you're funding at 80 basis points, rates go up 300 basis points, which is a massive move, right? You're still covered. You're making less money. That's really, really important to us to maintain the big buffer between where we fund and where we yield, and also to be able to add value on top of that. Again, to Garrett's good point, generally, we add 1,500 basis points worth of NOI on any asset that we buy. Did that answer your question?
Yeah, that answers my question. Thank you.
Thank you.
Sorry, final question will be around.
Sure.
Odaiba.
Yeah.
Did you mention the current occupancy rate that this is currently at and the progress that you're making with the?
Yeah.
With regards to the leasing of this asset?
Yeah. It's occupancy is about 56%-57% right now. Odaiba sort of drives us nuts. It's the only big office we own, big enough to matter. It was a special case, an Olympic venue, all that sort of thing. You know, we've done perfectly well on it in terms of against the business plan, all that sort of thing. There were lots of things that were possibly gonna happen in terms of, you know, the Olympics enhancing the value of the area and giving it attention, and we would be able to sell into it or after it or something like that. Of course, we had COVID and no Olympics, so it's like, okay, that didn't work out.
It is a really striking statement about how large-scale office is really under pressure. As I understand, it's under pressure globally. It's under pressure as far as we can tell in Japan. We only have one big asset. This is not big data. This is small data. We only have one big asset. We have one big office asset. Our small and mid-sized offices are doing great, and we're keeping them. You know, it appears to be a function of better value, lower cost per tsubo. Odaiba is currently at 56%-57%.
We targeted getting it to 80% if we can this year. I don't know. That may be hard to do because we're seeing continuing pressure on other large office assets. We've actually started work on doing a fairly substantial repositioning of the asset away from large companies towards more venture sorts of companies. By the way, I mean, not kind of like crypto startups as they were conservative people. You know, but you know, companies that are small and have robust businesses, and actually looking at creating kind of a community in that area. It's a big enough building that you could actually do some things that are interesting with kind of the neighborhood as it were. We're looking hard at that.
Odaiba is, as I said, 56%-57%. I expect by the end of year our occupancy will be higher than that. Don't know if it's gonna be as high as we want it to be. We'll just have to see how kind of the next kind of six months of leasing activity works.
Awesome. Thank you.
Thank you. All right. We will declare ourselves done. Thank you so much, everybody. We're really grateful for your time. I know it's busy and it's a tough time in the world. Everybody, take care, be safe. Have a very good day. Thanks so much.