Can you really trust the company managing your property?
Most owners of rental property carry a vague, nagging unease about their relationship with their management company. "I have no way to tell whether this repair estimate is fair." "The breakdown of management fees is opaque." "The service changes every time the assigned contact person changes." Complaints like these come out of a structural problem that runs deep across the whole industry.
INA&Associates is a property management company built around two commitments: management fees starting at ¥0 a month, among the lowest in the industry, and full transparency on the commissions it takes for arranging repair work. Why give up that much potential profit? The answer traces back to something I witnessed firsthand at age fifteen.
It started with my mother's tears
When I was fifteen, my mother owned a building. One day, an estimate for air conditioning work arrived from the management company: ¥30 million. The going rate for that kind of work was actually around ¥9 million. The management company had tacked on more than ¥20 million in commission on top of the real cost, and billed the whole amount to my mother as the owner.
"Why does an industry this indifferent to its own customers get to keep operating this way?" That question lodged itself deep in my chest. And at fifteen, I made up my mind: I would go independent at thirty and change this industry.
That formative experience was never just anger. The image of my mother, deceived by a management company and in tears, has stayed with me — it is the source of the energy that drives me. The mission of "building a society where people who work hard are rewarded" starts right there.
It began with questioning the industry's idea of "normal"
The property management industry runs on a revenue structure that has calcified over many years. When a management company places an order with a contractor, it's standard practice to mark up the price with a commission the owner is never told about. Owners pay believing they're being charged a fair market price, when in reality the amount has often been inflated substantially.
For a Western reader, this is worth pausing on: in markets like the US, a property manager typically earns a disclosed percentage of collected rent plus an explicit markup or flat fee on maintenance work that state licensing law and the manager's fiduciary duty to the owner generally require to be itemized. In Japan's property management industry, no equivalent disclosure obligation has historically existed, and the undisclosed markup on contractor work has functioned as one of management companies' primary sources of profit. That is precisely why so few companies have been willing to make the practice transparent: transparency means the revenue drops, and that dilemma has kept the whole industry locked in place.
INA&Associates chose to question that "normal." The decision was shaped by years spent building a career inside the industry, and by seeing that reality from the inside.
My career: where I sharpened the ability to change things
Before going independent, I built a career across several real estate and business fields. At a developer affiliated with Recruit, I took part in launching a management company for condominium buildings. After that, I worked in a listed company's buy-and-resell business, moved from its legal department into a new-business competition, and gained hands-on experience building a business from scratch.
At twenty-nine, after changing jobs, I became a division head at a listed company and developed a bird's-eye view of how a company is actually run end to end. At thirty, exactly as I had promised myself at fifteen, I went independent and founded INA&Associates.
What sets us apart is that we build our own systems in-house rather than commissioning an outside development company, which cuts our development costs substantially. We put that savings back into service quality and pricing.
How INA&Associates puts "customer first" into practice
Our most-subscribed rental management plan costs ¥1,000 a month. Here's how that's sustainable
The plan the largest number of our clients choose for rental management costs ¥1,000 (before tax) per month, per unit. Our actual cost runs around ¥600, so this business line alone generates almost no profit on its own. How is that possible? Because we generate our profit through our brokerage business, and treat property management as a means of achieving our mission rather than as a profit center in itself.
"We don't manage properties for the profit — we manage them to build a relationship the owner can actually trust." That idea sits at the foundation of how INA&Associates designs its whole business. We currently have zero cancellations of management contracts. To us, that number speaks for the trust owners place in us.
Full transparency on construction commissions
Against an industry built on undisclosed commissions, INA&Associates has set out a clear commission structure — 10%, 5%, or 3% depending on the scale of the work. The moment an owner receives an estimate, they can see exactly what the commission comes to.
In the short term, this transparency is a choice that lowers the company's own revenue. But we see it differently: trust can only ever come from transparency, and any profit gained by hiding something eventually damages the relationship somewhere down the line. Taking the long view, we're convinced that transparency itself is the strongest competitive advantage we can have.
Why we hire talented people from outside Tokyo, fully remote
Another distinguishing feature of INA&Associates is our policy of hiring talented people from outside Tokyo on a fully remote basis. We maintain a demanding hiring bar — roughly one hire for every sixty applicants — while giving skilled people who aren't based in Tokyo access to opportunities they'd otherwise be shut out of.
Our mission of "building a society where people who work hard are rewarded" isn't aimed only at our clients. The fact that living outside Tokyo can cut someone off from Tokyo-based work is itself a gap we see as ours to close. Creating an environment where talented people outside the capital can do their best work regardless of location is part of what we believe an organization should stand for.
To put this in context for readers elsewhere: distributed, fully remote hiring in property management is not unusual in the US, where firms have long recruited leasing and back-office staff across state lines. What is more distinctive here is the degree of regional concentration this policy is pushing back against — a far larger share of Japan's skilled service-sector labor has historically been drawn toward Tokyo than is typical of a comparably sized Western economy, which makes deliberately recruiting outside the capital a more pointed choice than it would be elsewhere.
INA&Associates' core values and management philosophy
The five core values that our founder holds to are the basis for day-to-day decision-making across the company.
- People are our greatest asset: we hold the line on our hiring standards and keep investing in the growth of everyone involved.
- A culture that isn't afraid to fail: continuing to take on challenges is the source of growth.
- A long-term view: we prioritize being a company that will be trusted ten or twenty years from now over short-term profit.
- The wellbeing of everyone involved: owners, tenants, staff, the surrounding community — we never lose sight of any of our stakeholders.
- Trust and honesty: disclosing our commissions and our management fees is a concrete expression of this value.
These aren't just words we display somewhere. Our pricing for rental management, our disclosure of construction commissions, our hiring policy — every one of these decisions is grounded in these five values.
Conclusion: why INA&Associates chooses to look past short-term profit
- The company's founding moment traces back to something witnessed at age fifteen: an unjustified, inflated bill from a management company, and a mother in tears.
- The ¥1,000-a-month rental management fee (against a real cost of about ¥600) is a means of realizing our mission, not a pursuit of profit.
- We moved construction commissions from an undisclosed basis to a transparent 10%/5%/3% structure, and earned owners' trust in the process.
- Zero cancellations of management contracts is proof, in our view, of a genuinely customer-first approach.
- Hiring regional talent on a fully remote basis is our organization's own internal practice of the mission that people who work hard should be rewarded.
- Our founder's own technical skill in building our systems in-house is what makes it possible to cut costs and improve service quality at the same time.
What INA&Associates is aiming for isn't simply being "the cheap management company." It's confronting the structural problems built into the real estate industry head-on, and remaining a partner that owners can genuinely trust. And behind all of that sits a larger vision: a society where people who work hard are rewarded.
Frequently asked questions
Q1. Can you really get proper management service for ¥1,000 a month?
Yes. Because INA&Associates secures its profit through its brokerage business, the management business itself is designed without chasing short-term profit. Our current record of zero cancellations of management contracts is the proof of our service quality.
Q2. What exactly does "transparency on construction commissions" mean in practice?
We disclose our commission rate — 10%, 5%, or 3% — based on the size of the order placed with a contractor. It's common across the industry for a commission of 20% to 30% to be added to a bill without the owner ever being told; at INA&Associates, every commission is disclosed to the owner. At the estimate stage, it's already clear exactly what you're paying for and how much.
Q3. Can I sign with INA&Associates even if I live outside Tokyo?
Yes. INA&Associates itself runs on a fully remote structure, including our staff, so we're set up to work with owners based anywhere in the country. We also have a large number of talented staff based in regional areas, which means we can offer support that's genuinely familiar with local conditions.
Q4. What kind of owner is the best fit for INA&Associates?
We're chosen especially by owners who value a long-term relationship of trust with their management company, owners who want transparency on construction and management costs, and owners who share our belief in customer-first property management. Regardless of the size of their portfolio, what matters most to us is an honest partnership.
Related reading
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- Does your management company disclose its construction commissions on your rental property?
- Closing the gap between Tokyo and the regions: INA&Associates' choice to hire fully remote
