Thank you everybody for joining. My name is Scott Callon, I'm Chairman of Ichigo. We're really grateful for your time. I'm joined today by Tet Fujita, who is our Lead Independent Director.
Yes. Hello, everybody. I'm the independent external board member and the Chairman of Audit Committee. Normally, I keep very quiet. If you have any questions, please address to me. I'm very happy to answer any questions as an external board member. Thank you.
Thank you, Tet. Also, we have with us Dan Morisaku, who is Senior Member of Finance team and our Head of Global IR.
Hi, I'm Dan Morisaku. I have called with many of you before, and excited to join the global conference this afternoon here in Tokyo. Thank you for joining with us.
All right. Let's get started. I'm working off of the presentation. It is on our website, FY 2022/2, so it's the February 2022 fiscal year, H1 first half corporate presentation. Again, thank you so much everybody for joining us. We're grateful for your time. Let me turn to the first page of presentation, which is page eight. Probably the most important thing that has happened is actually not on this page, which is coronavirus. This quarter, so the second quarter, it's the June, July, and August quarter in which Japan experienced an unprecedented surge of cases and fatalities. It was an extraordinary, difficult time for the country. In August. Since then, there's been this equally extraordinary collapse in cases and fatalities. Delta is all over Japan, just like it's all over the world. We're still trying to figure out why exactly this has happened.
We are sitting today in October together, here in Tokyo and those of you around the world. In Japan, we're in a totally different world than we were in Q2. At this point, 90% of those over 65 or older have been vaccinated. It's totally vaccinated. 66% for the country, twice, and 75% once. It looks like Japan is going with relatively low levels of vaccine hesitancy, and it's looking like it's going to go over 80%, and possibly could go as high as the mid-80s. That's apologies, that's not on the page because that's not about Ichigo, but it is about the country and the environment we operate in. Japan, knock on wood, has turned a corner in a very, very powerful way, which changes everything for us going forward.
It's not only the most important thing, it's the most optimistic, positive thing I can tell you. We're glad to be in Japan, which is back, and Ichigo is going to come back hard and fast. Turning to what's on the page. Hotel earnings recovery is slower. What I spoke to you in July, we were reflecting on that Japan seemed to have turned the corner on COVID before this explosion in Delta of the cases. It looks like it was going to be the case that we're going to have a recovery, both in hotel occupancy and in activity in the hotel buy/sell market. That didn't happen. Things turned really, really grim. We had a plunge in both the state of emergency in much of the country, and a plunge in activity.
Lots of people would say, "Hey, we're interested in possibly buying hotels," but they all canceled. The hotel earnings recovery has been pushed back. We think that's the answer, that it has been pushed back, and therefore we're possibly delayed three months to six months. Given what's happened at this point, we're clearly in a state where the hotel earnings are going to rebound very substantially. There has been a minimal COVID impact on mid-sized offices, which is overwhelmingly where we play. I will talk about the one big asset we have at Odaiba, which is big and important, which is in a very different world. We're having extraordinary, strong, stable NOI out of our mid-sized offices. Odaiba is different. It's a large office. There are challenges leasing it up, and I'll speak to that in some more detail. Clean energy is growing extraordinarily well.
That is, of course, completely unlinked to the economic cycle and to COVID. That's really exciting. We were, for the sixth year in a row, chosen for inclusion in the JPX-Nikkei 400, which is arguably the index of Japan's premier companies. It is thought by the JPX-Nikkei to be the index of Japan's premier companies in terms of value creation. We think since we exist substantially to create value for the world, including our shareholders, that makes it the premier index in Japan. We qualified for the TSE Prime Market, so we will move on to that on April 4th, 2022. Page nine speaks to highlights on earnings. By the way, this was a light quarter, as expected. The end of the first half is light. We have full earnings that come out of our value-add business that move around.
We do not spend a lot of time trying to position those earnings in any one quarter. We think that's the way you lose money rather than make money. It was a light first half. Nonetheless, the firm has got very durable earnings. Stock earnings, so those effectively fixed earnings, come in at twice our expenses. You see on the right side, some decrease in stock earnings and stable real estate. This is primarily rental income, and this is Odaiba. This is our one big asset, which I'll be speaking to, is experiencing more vacancy than we would've expected. Asset management, on the other hand, is up 17%, and rent reviews up 14%. Turn to page 10.
What I think is most interesting about this as it speaks very directly to the difference in between accounting reported earnings, and we would describe as economic earnings are literally intimately to cash generation. To be clear, we are all about rigorous, systematic, relentless focus on cash generation. The headline accounting numbers look poor. They were as expected. Those accounting numbers will improve very substantially. As I said, you've got OP down 22%, you've got net income down 38%, you've got cash EPS only down 2%. That speaks to the fact of the matter is that accounting had a whole bunch of non-cash stuff lying around in it. What's important to see is despite the significant drop in earnings, accounting earnings of course are linked to total earnings. We continue to have very, very robust cash generation.
It's a way of saying when the accounting earnings go up, and they will go up, cash earnings going up also very substantially. Page 11 gives you the sector breakdown. OP has got asset management up 27%. That's primarily on increase in Ichigo office assessment fees. Stable real estate business has got stock earnings down. That's primarily on depreciation expenses. Those are non-cash. They, of course, hit the OP line. That's down 7%, and the rest is a significant drop-off. In flow earnings, that is effectively entirely because we did more value-add sales in the first half of last year. We're going to do more in the second half. Nothing to worry about there. Clean energy continues to go very, very well. We had our first power plant we brought online this year, and that has contributed to the earnings.
Looking at page 12, I think it's probably most important to focus on what's changed between Q1 and Q2. I won't go into particular detail on that, on the unchanged part. Stock earnings are relatively unchanged from Q1. Very, very high impact on hotel. Not a lot of impact at all on either office, as I described. However, I should say that's primarily mid-size office. We have one big asset, Odaiba. It's large scale office. It is experiencing more of an impact. Since most we own is mid-size office, we're speaking to that on this page. Residential and clean energy, of course, are having no impact. When I say, of course, energy, no impact. Residential, since Japan has done a very good job projecting income, there has been no impact on that performance.
Turning to flow, the big change is in office, or the two changes in office and retail. Those markets are clearly coming back. What was unexpected and what I just touched on was we thought hotel, in terms of buy-sell activity. Flow earnings are about buy-sell activities in these asset types. We thought hotel was coming back. It was coming back. A sharp U-turn to, wait a minute, we're not sure we want to own these assets anymore. Let's see what happens. Given that it affects, as I said, we've broken the backs of the Delta variant in Japan at this point. We expect hotel activity to come back, probably pushed back 3-6 months.
Pages 14 and onwards speaks to the business model, and I've touched on this before, so I won't go into great length, but happy to take any comments or questions in Q&A. It's both a stock plus flow earnings model. Stock earnings massively cover our expenses, so we effectively are structurally earners. On top of that, we have, we think, robust and high value, high-quality flow earnings. Page 15 shows you the embedded foreign earnings. Again, it's important to understand that, and we're fine with this, but it's important for investors to understand that full value creation is not reflected in our accounting earnings. It's not only about the cash generation being different, but it's also that we do value add. It creates value, and that value is only recognized both on an accounting and a cash basis when we do by sale.
What that implies is you have significant unrealized gains that are on the balance sheet that are earnings back for future periods to be turned to. Currently, these are external third-party appraisers. I think we've got about JPY 64 billion of unrealized capital gains on the balance sheet. That's against a book right now of about JPY 100 billion, so plus 60% against book value. If you turn to the next page, it shows you that we systematically outperform what the third-party appraisers think in terms of the actual value created. Generally, it's between 2x and 2.5x of what the third-party appraisers say we're going to earn. If you see in this year, H1, we actually have a very low number, 1.4x. That's linked to us deciding to dispose of a bulk regional residential portfolio that we did an experiment on.
Didn't make much money, didn't lose money, effectively we exited that at no real profit. We think the systematic normalized trend continues to be about 2x - 2.5x of what third-party appraisers are saying. Even at as low as 2x, given COVID uncertainty, that implies we've got about JPY 130 billion, at least, of unrealized gains on the assets balance sheet from real estate. Again, that's more than our current shareholder equity. That does not account for what we think is a very, very large amount of unrealized gains in our clean energy business, and I'll speak to that later. Page 17 also speaks to how we're very focused on robust cash generation, and it shows up in our economic operating cash flow systematically being higher than our income.
Page 18 shows our financial base continued to borrow very long, so we have the ability to finance our assets through a very long time. You'll see that there's been some drop off in the period of the remaining loan maturity. That's linked to the fact that Ichigo Owners business is an increasingly large part of our business. I'll speak to that later again. Average holding period in this business is less than a year, 0.8. What's that? Something about 9-10 months. We tend to borrow in that business around seven years. We don't need seven years. We're actually very conservative in making sure we have a balance sheet that's bulletproof. That explains that. Some drop off period. Again, robustly massively longer period of maturity of liabilities to finance our assets.
You can see there continues to be a drop off in the interest rate that we pay. page 20 is acquisitions and sales during the first half. Almost entirely on the acquisition front, was Ichigo Owners. Again, that's a business that does prime, arguably super prime, almost entirely Tokyo residential. If it's not Tokyo, it's kind of in the prime equivalent, and brand new residential assets. Super, super liquid, good value. For investors, this has been a very, very attractive asset class given how robust its performance has been despite COVID. It is worth pointing out the sales have been JPY 11 billion, we did a large sale, which we already disclosed to the market, about JPY 18 billion on 16 residential assets out of Owners to a domestic buyer. That's been contracted and that will close in November. Wait till the earnings.
The earnings from that are coming in, and again, we're hitting Q3. On the page, net acquisitions are slightly higher. This is again residential for the Owners business overwhelmingly. It's worth pointing out that the residential sale that we did here of JPY 5.3 billion was an experiment, and we do experiments. We think that's valuable and important. This was arguably a failed experiment. The Owners business is brand-new assets in great locations. It's going to be arguably super prime. We thought it was worth looking at whether or not we could generate value in regional residential, the typical kind of age, say, the 10-15 years old, multi-family, perfectly functional. Proved to be a harder business all over the country, not great economics in terms of cost structure for us in order to maintain and derive value there.
Over a number of years, we sold out of this portfolio. It was originally over JPY 10 billion, $100 million, and we did the final exit of it. We are now completely gone out of used regional residential assets. Page 21 gives you a view on what's happening with Owners over time. This is a business we set up four years ago. It's going extraordinarily well. There's an engine, right? You buy assets, and then you own and sell them. We obviously want to be buying assets because we have a robust sales pipeline and sales activity. At this point in H1, the progress against our target for acquisitions is 0%-70% on an executed contract basis. If you include kind of the pipeline of we think we're going to get this done, it's about 90%.
Owners feeding the Owners engine is going quite well. Page 22 speaks to the value-add business in sustainable real estate. I won't go into too much length because I'm pretty sure most of you are familiar with this. It's worth pointing out the NOI uplift in our sustainable real estate business has been about 20%. It's been 25%. That's a weighted average. What it gets at is the fact that we're selling these assets at a profit is intimately linked because we make the assets more profitable. You push up the NOI by 25%, you sell the asset up 25%, you're just selling at the gap rate that you bought it at. Once it's become a better performer, you generally get a premium for assets that were performing better. You can see there the gross profit margin in the multi-asset business.
That's kind of average hold with three years. It's been 32%. Owners is a much higher turnover business. We like that. You're not taking risk on a holding period. It's less than a year. It has a GPM of about 11%. They are different assets. They're different asset classes. Multi-asset at this point doesn't do much residential. Primarily, it's office, it's hotel, it's retail. Owners is exclusively high-end, brand new, again, overwhelmingly Tokyo [inaudible]. Page 23 speaks to what's happening with the two REITs, Ichigo Office and Ichigo Hotel, along with Ichigo Green, our solar power producer. It's worth noting that Ichigo Office is on route to being the first J-REIT. We'll have to see if someone beats us there. It expects to convert over to 100% renewable electricity, and primarily solar and wind, by April 2022. That would make it the first Japanese REIT to achieve that.
Across the firm as Ichigo, we expect to hit that by 2025. I mean, arguably, we're already there. The RE100 rules don't allow you to count your production. We're producing the energy we need, renewable energy we need to put solar and wind in order to do everything we need for ourselves. RE100 doesn't count production, only counts what you buy. Anyway. The Ichigo Office REIT will be, we think, will be the first REIT to get to 100% renewable. Page 24 shows what's happening in the clean energy business. On top of the pipeline that we have here on the far right-hand side, which is the kind of royal blue part of the graph, is green biomass, which we're working on. We also expect will be a significant earnings driver. That is a brand new business.
We're actually pretty conservative in the way we think about how we describe our pipeline, so it's not in here. We fully expect that to begin to happen in the next 18 months. It's also worth pointing out that there was a truly spectacular announced transaction where ENEOS, big Japanese oil company, is buying the primarily solar , well, actually it's not primary. So renewable portfolio, solar and wind from Japan Renewable Energy at about JPY 200 billion. That business' current revenues are less than ours, so P is less than ours. They have a stated pipeline which is bigger than ours. It's actually worth pointing out, you see on this page at the average FIT, we have JPY 31. Currently, if you are selling solar power, for example, it's going to be about a third of that.
It's a way of saying we were involved in this business very early with very high tariffs. For example, we've got currently 130 MW going under Using the current FIT that would be something that looks more like 400 MW. The economics are radically different for all the other comps that have super normal returns of debt to them. Anyway, we think that's a super exciting transaction. We need to do a lot more work on it. It does speak very directly to, we think, a very high possibility that the market is systematically very significantly undergrabbing our clean energy business. Page 25. Tradepia Odaiba. This is the large asset that I spoke to. It's so big, it's about 10% of our total assets. It's 40% of our office portfolio, which means it's a minor but big, it's really, really important.
We got an S rank, which is the highest CASBEE, so this is renewable, sustainable building certification. It is our second asset which has the S rank. Why do we do this? We do this because we care. Ichigo works to be good for the world. Not only do we care, but our investors and particularly global investors, increasingly Japanese investors care. I point this out because it's not clear at this point that tenants really care. When you do work to make a building more sustainable, it's good for the world. It's good for all of us. It's good for growing asset value.
What I'm telling you is it's not necessarily good for growing NOI, meaning it's not clear at this point, and we hope this will change, that tenants will increasingly realize the value of being in a building which is right for the planet and right for society. At this point, we don't get a premium rent on it. We do get a premium in terms of value creation. What I'm telling you is it effectively a low cap rate. We think this is a very, very positive for Odaiba. This is a page about Odaiba as a sustainable building. It's worth pointing out that we are experiencing a very different leasing environment for this. This has got floor size generally kind of 5x to 10 x bigger than our mid-size assets.
It's clearly the case that our primarily SME tenants in the smaller floor plates, they're not moving, they're willing to pay higher rents. In the larger size floor plate like Odaiba, you're seeing significant increases in vacancies. This is a harder building to lease. We think we will lease it up fully. We thought we were going to get it done sooner rather than later. I think I guided everybody to about one year from now, but it may take longer than that. We're looking carefully about what we need to do for the asset. To give you an example, It's a former headquarters building. It's beautiful. It's super high spec. Not only is it sustainable, it's super high spec. It's tall. It's a tall building. It generally competes with tall buildings in the middle of Tokyo.
What's the difference between this tall building and a tall building in Tokyo? Take a look at the picture on the page. This tall building doesn't have anything around it. If you wanted to differentiate and explain why this asset is more interesting than a central Tokyo asset. A central Tokyo asset, it's like a tall building in Manhattan. You generally don't get a view unless you go to the park. In this case, it's got a view. A spectacular view. Again, trying to understand what is distinct and valuable. Distinct and valuable, meaning distinctive and therefore valuable to people. Distinct that needs to be valuable is important. We're working on this. The good news is we're overwhelmingly in small and mid-sized office. It's what we've done. It's what we continue to do.
We're beating the business plan on this asset. It is proving to be a very different leasing environment than everything else we own. Page 25. I'm sorry, page 26. For the sixth year in a row, we're going to dip the JPX-Nikkei 400. Page 27. We believe in doing buybacks when the shares are cheap. That's been ongoing. We fully expect it to continue to be ongoing. Page 28, we have a J.League shareholder program. We are a top partner for the J.League. That's sports, Japanese football league or soccer league, depending which word you want to use. Which was relatively shut down during COVID. It's about to come back. That's really exciting. We get all these tickets and generally, these Japanese companies take those tickets and give them to staff. I don't know, use them for business events.
We work for shareholders. We've chosen to give these all away to our shareholders, not only of this company but our two REITs and our recent solar power producer. Those are my prepared remarks as it were. Thank you so much, everybody. We're going to turn to Q&A, and I'm supposed to guide you through this. Hopefully you're familiar with Zoom. You can either click Raise Hand if you're on the app or the browser. I think you actually have an ability to do something interesting if you're on the phone. We're going to show that page. On the phone, you also can enter star nine, and then re-enter star nine to raise your other questions. Those of you who are on Zoom or on the phone, we are open for Q&A, comments. Rarely get comments, but we do value them.
We work for all of you. Anyway, looking for anything from anybody. Greg, do you have a question?
Yes. Can you hear me?
Yep. We got you. Thanks so much.
Yes. I've got a couple of questions, please, Scott and the team.
Go for it.
First, you made a comment regarding the gain on sales as a multiple of appraisal value.
Yeah.
Presentation, it says 1.4x for the most recent period, but you expected that to go back to 2x-2.5 x.
Yeah.
Because the latest sample of sales, so to speak, is not very representative. Is it too small to matter? Is that correct?
That's right. We disposed the regional residential portfolio, effectively at cost. It's a one-off. We think 2x-2.5x is the right metric to think about us going forward.
Understood. That was affected by the residential portfolio. Okay. My second question is, as you pointed out, the Ichigo Owners continue to be very strong. My understanding is it's now fairly hard to actually source properties to buy, and obviously price per tsubo have gone up.
Yeah.
Are you seeing that we are kind of near a peak, at least in terms of volume? Do you see things slowing down a little bit after COVID, or are we continuing on the same trend? Thank you.
Greg, we're seeing no slowdown at all in the owners business. It's interesting. COVID has been terrible for the world. If you look at stock markets, you look at real estate prices, it's not been terrible for them. You have slightly different genesis in the various asset classes. Because Japan, by the way, is experiencing, as you know, absolutely no inflation. It continues to have interests kind of floored at zero. The implication is that you get no return out of bonds. People are desperate for yield, and residential has been performing so well. We have this massive demand for those assets. As you know, our business model is, how is it we earn the return that we do in this business? We agree with developers that we'll buy.
These are very small and fast developments, multi-family, in good areas. We'll do due diligence on a development. We'll agree to buy it 18 to 24 months down the road. We don't take the development risk on it. It needs to be built to spec. In return for us agreeing to buy it, these tend to be relatively smaller developers. They can take the contract from Ichigo, go to a bank, and get it financed. That's one thing we do, is we enable these smaller developers to get better financing, and they're willing to give us a spread for that. The second thing we do is we lease these up. We'll buy them empty, and we lease them up. We've got a very good leasing team. Those two are what we deliver.
What we're doing with our final client is we're delivering the economics that come from that better pricing from the developer, the economics for the risk in taking on leasing, and we don't think there's a lot of risk there. Meaning, we do due diligence on these assets and understand what we can do with them. We're very experienced in leasing. That's a value add that we create. The third one is we're professional real estate investors, and we know these assets, and locations really well. Our investors are paying us for that. The gross margin is a little bit about 10%. They're not paying us a lot. We think it's actually extraordinarily good value for the investor, and the investors agree.
At this point, we're doing about, I told you, our acquisition, we expect to do about JPY 30 billion. It's a little bit less than $300 million per year. I think likely, Greg, that grows to more like JPY 40 billion, JPY 50 billion. It's a very successful business model. I seem to have slowed down.
Understood. Thank you.
Thank you. Happy to take other questions or comments.
I'll have another one if no one's asking.
Yeah. I am just pausing. It looked to me, Greg, like you had a question. I was waiting to be told that you do. Thank you for announcing yourself. Go for it.
Yeah. Just on the green energy business. As you mentioned, this transaction for JRE by ENEOS is quite huge.
Yeah.
Do you expect we see similar transaction from other utilities trying to make their asset or their business greener? Are you trying to step up in terms of investment, on that front, try to accumulate an attractive portfolio there? Thank you.
Yeah. What's interesting is I think the answer is yes. Energy companies all over the world are feeling tremendous pressure from zero carbon, as they should. Trying to figure out a path forward that's not dependent on fossil fuels is important literally to their survival. That was a great transaction to see. We need to do a bunch of work on understanding it. The headline megawatt numbers on that is basically fivefold bigger than us. The story, though, the true economic size is going to be substantially smaller than that. It also includes Taiwanese assets, we understand those economics better. Japan has had much better returns to it. Understanding the amount of that, the amount of offshore wind, which is not very profitable.
On that basis, we'll have a better understanding of how our portfolio positions relative to JRE. It has been our view that we have clearly somewhere between, we think, JPY 50 billion and JPY 100 billion of unrealized gains in our clean energy portfolio. This would suggest that that view is accurate and going to the high end or perhaps above the high end going forward. On the second point, do we want to do more? Yes. We're actively involved in doing more in sustainable and what we call clean energy.
Understood. Thank you.
Thank you. Do we have a question from Richard? Richard, are you there?
Oh, hi there. Can you hear me now?
Yep. Got you.
Okay. Perfect. Thanks for this. I was wondering, could you elaborate a little bit on the rise in depreciation costs for your sustainable real estate? It was a significant jump. Was it just purely for the Odaiba building and was this unforeseen? Maybe you can elaborate a little bit on that, please.
Yeah. Look, depreciation is a non-cash expense. It matters because assets will lose value over time. The good news is that you have this extraordinary accelerated depreciation regimes. These are buildings that will run for 50 years, for 70 years, 100 years. You have a little bit of maintenance CapEx in it, of course. What I'm telling you is that the accounting depreciation, which is a tax shield, and that's why we like it, is much higher than the actual economic depreciation. These are not existing buildings that we had that suddenly have higher depreciation. This is us bringing online. It's primarily we brought on two brand-new hotels in THE KNOT series, a brand-new hotel in Hiroshima, and a brand-new hotel in Sapporo last year. That's where the new depreciation allowance is coming from.
Okay. This is basically using the current accelerated depreciation tax scheme f or those two new assets and basically Yeah. Okay.
We prefer to call it a tax shield rather than tax scheme.
Yeah.
Exactly. It is part of the tax rules. It helps protect cash, for all of you. Yes, that's exactly what it is.
Okay. Yeah. Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. Let's see. I think we have Will next. Will, are you there?
Yeah. Hi, Scott. There we go. I asked a question on the iPad in text. I'll just repeat those.
Okay. Sorry, we missed it.
Yeah. Just quickly, I heard hotels were beneath or below expectation.
Yeah
Just quick recount of in the second quarter, what was below expectation or basically was it in line with expectation? Despite the low, I guess 4% margins on the asset sales are a bit of anomaly. It's happened in the past once or twice.
Yeah
That was an anomaly. Excluding that, what would you say is in line or beneath expectations in the second quarter? Roughly for the second half-
Yeah.
Are there trends that you saw in the second quarter that are going to continue that are disappointing, or are you pretty much confident in the second half? That'd be question one. While I'm at it, the second question's related to green energy, which everyone's asking about.
Yeah.
I always ask this, but I'm going to prod you again. Isn't it that transaction that Goldman does, them obviously using the robust market to exit at the right time, isn't it tempting to maybe exit a little bit of your portfolio, in order to perhaps reinvest in other opportunities? That's the second question. Thank you.
H1's first half, Will, was bang on. The numbers that you see here, there was no disappointment and no particular upside relative to our expectations. Going forward, two negatives. One I already touched on. One is that the hotel market looked like it was returning, and then it just got crushed by the surge in COVID cases. Now again, the surge of COVID cases itself has been crushed. We think hotel earnings have probably been pushed back, and that's twofold. That's one, occupancy. It's been pushed back whatever it is. We'll find out together what the government does with Go To Travel, et cetera. Has it been pushed back three months, six months? Could be more because particularly our KNOT, which is boutique hotel series, it's been proven extraordinarily attractive for inbound tourists, primarily U.S. and European.
We don't think we're going to get full economics out of particularly THE KNOT in Shinjuku, Tokyo and Hiroshima until we have inbound back. That will happen at some point, presumably in the next two years. Anyway, you had a little bit of pushback in hotel revenue, a little bit of pushback in time in sales activity at hotels. I think we'll all find out together, but given that Japan has now got three months ago, people were excited about buying Japanese hotels when we had COVID cases that were massively higher than they are today. I think it's probably a reasonable assumption, we'll find out together, that that market comes back, and we'll again be selling hotels at the levels that we think are saleable in the next three to six months.
That's just probably a three to six month delay on hotel earnings, which will impact the second half. The second thing that's a negative is, well, Odaiba is proving a bit harder, at least in the way than expected. Meaning that we're seeing bigger vacancy in other large-scale assets and other owners trying to fill those assets. Very specifically, what's happening is we've had a few cases where, we've had tenants sign effectively, maybe would be the wrong word, but say, "Okay, we're going to move to you. We need to issue our notice to our existing landlord." See the existing landlord provide a very powerful counteroffer to it. It tells you, and that's not happening at all for us in these small offices. The large office space, unfortunately, it's big enough to matter.
It's 10% of its total assets, but it's only 10%. For those folks who own a lot more large office, it's a very difficult period. We'll have to figure out together whether or not this is a particular point in time with COVID or if the fact work from home has had an impact on large office that's distinctly different from small. On the good news part of things, Owners is roaring back. We worried about our ability to buy assets and there has been increased competition, but actually, we are proving to be more than competitive in getting assets at the levels we want. That is a surprise on the upside and will be a driver of earnings going forward. Two, the fact of the matter is that COVID is kind of receding in Japan means the country opens up.
The collapse in cases has been much more rapid than we thought was going to happen. Nobody would thought that was going to happen in the last couple months. That implies actually an acceleration of economic activity that will be powerful for hotels. It's a little bit of a counterexample to what I just said about the earlier pushback in hotel earnings. Broadly speaking, for us, we have been waiting out on COVID. I'll give you an example of sustainable energy space. We're super community-oriented. We'll never do a power plant without local community approval. It's been hard to meet with municipalities over the last six months because of COVID. There has been a pushback in development of our clean energy pipeline because if you come from Tokyo, we're not going to meet you. That is opening up. That's super exciting.
To your question is, whether the timing might be appropriate for us to do something in clean energy. Yeah, it could be. We are very open to that. We'll do a bunch of work on it. I don't know if it's the case if we're going to announce on our earnings call what the plan is, but we're certainly capable of doing a large transaction, and at the right economics, we will do that large transaction. Again, we loved the ENEOS JRE transaction. Did I get to your questions?
Okay. Yeah. Thanks very much.
Thanks, Will. Happy to take more questions or comments. Will, I think you're back.
Yeah. What's the most attractive space right now for investment, in your view, just in terms of asset class? Why, I suppose. Thanks.
That's a good question. If we can get solar done, that's clearly the best. Our view, and it's a hypothesis, and you test your hypothesis against kind of evidence as it emerges, is that the market continues to substantially underprice post-FIT earnings of these renewable energy assets. In other words, you had a 20-year FIT. There have been changes to that. For those assets that still qualify for the FIT, and of course, all of ours do. It's like, okay, after 20 years is up, what are your economics going to be? It's so clearly the case that Japan can't meet its sustainable energy goals without more ongoing and growth in sustainable energy, that we think those economics are likely to be very powerful. Solar is, without question, the most cost competitive.
There are regulatory changes underway to allow, for example, more agricultural land to become dual-use for solar. We like wind a lot, too. Land-based, not ocean-based. I've talked about that before. Japan has this huge fall-off in the continental shelf. It's really tough to make the economics work. We think offshore wind is about 7x more expensive than solar. That's the place to be. We're working on it. As I told you, it's been hard to meet people during the COVID period. As we come out of the COVID freeze, that's a place where we want to be very active. In terms of more classic real estate assets. Yeah. Real estate is so specific. It's not only what area, it's like what building. In our case, what we can do with the building.
We think small and mid office is very compelling, in part because the challenges I described in large offices, which are a huge part of the market and impact investors in the office market, have kind of scared them off, and we're seeing totally different economics, total different durability, and uplift in rents available. We really like offices a lot. Hotels are going to be a growth engine when COVID comes back. The reason why I'm not mentioning hotels right now is because we have possibly for inbound to come back, which is going to be the big driver, we think, of full hotel economics in Japan, and particularly for us. I don't know, Will. We'll have to figure that out. We'll learn together. Is that a year away? Is that 18 months away? It's probably not six months away.
You have some risk around it. With Omicron and Delta for the moment, it's going to be something else that comes up. Because of the volatility of the sector and the terrible current economic performance, we're not deciding to make a big bet there.
Great. Thanks very much, Scott.
Thanks, Will.
Thanks for your presentation.
Thank you. Thanks for joining. We're grateful to all of you. Looking for, again, more questions or comments. Are we done? This could be a going once, going twice. Okay, I think we're done. Thank you, everybody. We appreciate your time. It's a tough new world. Everybody take care. Be safe. Have a really good day.