On October 30, LIFULL Co., Ltd. (2120) transferred the trust beneficiary interests in four private-rental villas located in Hakone (Kanagawa), Kamogawa (Chiba) and Nikko (Tochigi) to RMB1 G.K. for ¥5,583 million. The book value was ¥5,396 million, a difference of roughly ¥187 million (+3.5% over book). Cross-checking against the November 2024 acquisition disclosure, the transfer price is the same figure as the acquisition price (¥5,583 million, excluding tax), and the holding period was about one year and ten months. This article examines the shape of this “exit” — an asset converted from idle real estate into lodging moving from an operating company to an SPC — using estimated settled ADR for the three municipalities, the supply trend for vacation rentals, and location data from the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure, Transport and Tourism (MLIT).

Key Points — Four Repurposed Villas Sold at Their Acquisition Price

Deal Structure — +3.5% Over Book, Executed Two Days After the Oct 28 Resolution

According to Zaikei Shimbun (November 2), LIFULL’s board resolved on a conditional transfer on October 28; the conditions were finalized on October 30, and the contract was signed and the transfer executed on the same day. The four properties are Rakuten STAY VILLA Sengokuhara North (仙石原北館) and Sengokuhara South (仙石原南館) in Hakone, Rakuten STAY VILLA Kamogawa (鴨川) in Kamogawa, and Rakuten STAY VILLA Nikko (日光) in Nikko — all trust beneficiary interests in lodging facilities including land and buildings. As the purpose of the transfer, the company cited reallocating management resources after gaining business know-how, and strengthening its financial position.

It is important to note that the ¥187 million gap to book value does not translate directly into profit. Transaction costs and tax effects were not disclosed in the report, and the company expects the impact on consolidated results for FY9/2027 to be minor, to be reflected in the earnings forecast scheduled for release on November 12. This article therefore does not assert the amount of the gain on sale and limits itself to setting out the relationship between price and book value as fact.

The 2024 Acquisition Disclosure — Repurposed Villas on Fixed Rent

To understand what the exit means, we need to revisit the terms of entry. According to the November 2024 disclosure, LIFULL acquired the four properties from Rakuten Group, a related party. The properties were operated by Rakuten STAY, which was to continue operating them after the acquisition, with LIFULL receiving fixed rent. The stated rationale was to combine know-how in operating lodging facilities renovated from idle real estate with know-how in fractional, distributed real estate utilization.

The scale of earnings can be inferred from the outlook given at acquisition. For FY9/2025 (about 10 months from the acquisition date to the end of September), revenue of about ¥250 million, operating profit of about ¥100 million and profit before tax of about ¥70 million were expected. Simply converting this revenue outlook to 365 days gives about ¥310 million a year, which reads as a gross yield of about 5.5% on the ¥5,583 million acquisition price. However, this is merely an annualization of the company’s outlook; the actual rent terms and the terms of this transfer have not been disclosed.

On the other hand, a fixed-rent structure is easy for buyers to value. If the operator absorbs fluctuations in lodging revenue, investors can price the asset based on rent stability and the tenant’s creditworthiness. Being tradable as rent-generating real estate rather than as an operated private-rental villa likely makes it easier to structure an exit to an SPC.

Location and Scale — 48 Units Across Three Municipalities, All With Hot Springs

According to the official website, Kamogawa has 16 buildings in total; its suites are about 298 ㎡, and even standard types exceed 100 ㎡. Nikko has 21 villas, all over 100 ㎡, each with a natural hot spring and private sauna. Sengokuhara consists of two buildings — North (opened July 2021) and South (opened October 2021) — with every room featuring a free-flowing natural hot spring indoor bath, at about 92 ㎡ per room and sleeping up to 10 guests. As the official website does not state the total number of rooms at Sengokuhara, this article uses MetroEngines Research’s listing-based count of 11 rooms.

On this basis, the total comes to 48 units (Kamogawa’s 16 buildings and Nikko’s 21 buildings are official figures; Sengokuhara’s 11 rooms are listing-based), and dividing the transfer price gives about ¥116 million per unit. This looks expensive compared with a typical hotel room, but given the nature of private-rental assets — around 100 ㎡ of floor area per unit with dedicated hot spring and sauna facilities — the appropriate yardstick is closer to a “building” than a hotel “room.”

Estimated Settled ADR in the Three Municipalities — All Above Prior Year Over the Last 12 Months

First, let us check the rate levels in the markets where the properties sit. Averaging MetroEngines Research’s estimated settled ADR (municipal median) over the trailing 12 months (October 2025–September 2026), Hakone stood at ¥26,500, up 3.6% from ¥25,600 in the prior-year period; Kamogawa at ¥22,400 (+5.9%); and Nikko at ¥17,900 (+2.4%). Rates rose year on year in all three, and the fact that market pricing held up during the holding period supports buyers in setting a price.

Overlaying monthly movements in Hakone, the seasonal peaks fall in August and in November–December. September 2026 came in at ¥25,900, up 4.7% from ¥24,700 a year earlier, and October at ¥27,700 (+8.5%), with notable growth in early autumn. By contrast, August was ¥28,200, down 3.4% YoY, suggesting autumn demand rather than the summer peak drove rates higher. November and December figures are estimates based on listed rates at the time of the survey and will change.

We also look at listed prices limited to vacation rentals (all-plan average, 2 guests per room, tax-inclusive). Trailing 12-month averages were ¥54,200 in Hakone (+18.0% YoY), ¥59,100 in Kamogawa (+4.6%) and ¥35,600 in Nikko (+6.5%). Because vacation rentals are not included in the segments used for estimated settled ADR, listed prices are shown here. These figures far exceed the medians for ordinary hotels and ryokan, reflecting the depth of demand from groups and families renting an entire building.

Depth of Villa Supply — 48% of 2026 Openings Are Vacation Rentals; Reading the Exit Market

How easy an exit is depends on how many players build, sell and buy similar assets. Within MetroEngines Research’s coverage, 1,869 lodging facilities opened in 2026 (listing-confirmed basis), of which 897 — 48.0% — were vacation rentals. In 2025 the figure was 768 of 1,789 (42.9%), so the share rose by just over 5 points in one year. Vacation rentals outnumber business hotels (266 in 2025 → 223 in 2026), and the main driver of new supply is shifting toward whole-building rentals.

The trend is the same within the three municipalities. Vacation rentals with confirmable opening dates over the seven years 2020–2026 number 87 in Hakone, 22 in Kamogawa and 22 in Nikko. Hakone saw 19 openings in 2026 alone, the most of any year, and the number of properties with confirmable listed prices as vacation rentals rose from 45 in October 2024 to 106 in September 2026. Thicker supply means more competition, but from an asset standpoint it also means more comparable transactions and operating cases, making pricing easier.

Note that listing-confirmed opening data often appear several months after the actual opening, so the 2026 count may increase as further listings appear. Rebrandings of the same building may also be counted as openings, so the counts are best treated as an indication of the direction of supply.

Site Conditions — Zoning, Hazards and Land Prices of the Three Properties

In a buyer’s due diligence, legal restrictions and disaster risk are what affect price. Checking each property’s location (coordinates estimated from the address) against MLIT’s Real Estate Information Library, the conditions of the three properties diverge clearly.

Sengokuhara is in a low-rise exclusive residential zone, with building volume capped at a floor area ratio of 80% and building coverage ratio of 40%. Conversely, large lodging facilities are hard to build nearby, so the villa-area landscape and quiet are likely to be preserved. Its overlap with a sediment disaster warning area (debris flow) and its coverage by the Mt. Hakone volcanic evacuation plan are items to check in insurance terms and business continuity plans. Within a 3 km radius there are 82 properties with 2,408 rooms on a listing basis, of which 54 properties with 1,662 rooms had confirmable selling prices in the last three months. Palace Hotel Hakone (69 rooms) is also scheduled to open in autumn 2029, pushing the area’s price range upward. The supply and rates in Sengokuhara are covered in detail in our analysis of Palace Hotel Hakone’s opening plan and the Sengokuhara 2 km radius.

Kamogawa is close to a major visitor draw — about a five-minute walk from Kamogawa Sea World — but falls within a tsunami inundation zone of 5 m to under 10 m. This is not unusual for a seaside resort asset, but evacuation routes, the feasibility of vertical evacuation and the building’s wave resistance are issues buyers will factor into price. Nikko is in a Category 1 Residential Zone and is not subject to any sediment, flood or tsunami designation. Nearby residential land prices are roughly flat at −1.2% YoY, yet Nikko’s estimated settled ADR was above the prior year on a 12-month average, suggesting the asset is valued more on lodging income than on land value.

The Buyer’s Lens — Sensitivity Around a ~5.5% Gross Yield

Regarding the buyer, RMB1 G.K., the Zaikei Shimbun article does not mention its investors or operating structure. However, acquiring trust beneficiary interests through a godo kaisha vehicle is a scheme widely used by private real estate funds to hold assets (for the differences between direct ownership, trust beneficiary interests and SPCs, see Three Hotel Acquisition Vehicles). Such buyers typically compare properties by yield — rental income divided by purchase price. We therefore estimated the relationship between annual rent and price over a range, starting from the company’s outlook at acquisition.

Dividing the base-case ¥310 million a year by 48 units gives about ¥6.4 million per unit per year, or about ¥17,600 per day in rent-equivalent terms. More important than the rent level itself is the upside in the lodging income that supports it. With estimated settled ADR above the prior year in all three municipalities and vacation-rental listed prices up 18.0% YoY in Hakone, current conditions point to upside potential at rent renewal or when the operating structure is reviewed.

Table 4 varies only rent, but the price a buyer is willing to pay also moves with the expected yield. Crossing five rent levels with five expected yields, the combinations that fall within ±2% of the ¥5,583 million transfer price (in bold) line up along the table’s diagonal: “−20% rent × 4.5%,” “−10% rent × 5.0%,” “base rent × 5.5%” and “+10% rent × 6.0%.” Working backwards, ¥5,583 million can be explained by annual rent of about ¥280 million at a 5.0% expected yield, or about ¥335 million at 6.0%. Each 0.5-point rise in the expected yield lowers the price by about 8–10%, so even with the same rent, the buyer’s read on the expected yield greatly shapes the exit price.

Implications for Companies With Idle Real Estate and Regional Banks — Designing “Convert, Then Sell”

Viewed from an operating company’s perspective, this deal can be positioned as a case that quickly executed the latter half of a process: renovating idle real estate, converting it into lodging, building an operating track record, and then selling it to an SPC. The company cited accumulating know-how in operations and resale as its acquisition purpose, and secured an exit at the same price as its acquisition cost in about one year and ten months. By avoiding development risk, holding a completed, operating asset with fixed rent, and seeing it through to exit, the deal offers a useful sequence for operating companies considering how to put idle assets to work.

From a regional financial institution’s perspective, private-rental villas have few rooms but a large business scale per building, and the number of such deals as targets for lending or fund investment is growing. When evaluating them, lenders should check side by side the term and renewal conditions of the lease with the operator, any overlap with hazard zones, and the pace of vacation-rental supply in the same municipality. The more an area is in a phase of rising rates, the more the question of who captures the income upside during the fixed-rent period becomes a point of negotiation in deal terms.

The case in which four hotels with 194 rooms in Nasu and Hakone were sold as trust beneficiary interests was a sale by an operating company that had held hotel assets for the long term. In this deal, the seller is a real estate information services company, the assets are private-rental villas, and the holding period was under two years — very different in character even though both are trust beneficiary interest sales. As villa supply grows, such short-hold exit cases will accumulate, and the yardsticks for pricing the asset class will become more established.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q. How much did LIFULL sell the four villas for?

A. The transfer price was ¥5,583 million. The book value was ¥5,396 million, a difference of about ¥187 million (+3.5%). The amount of the gain on sale is not stated in the disclosure report.

Q. Who is the buyer?

A. RMB1 G.K. The Zaikei Shimbun article does not describe its investors or the post-acquisition operating structure.

Q. Where are the properties located?

A. The four properties are Rakuten STAY VILLA Sengokuhara North and Sengokuhara South in Hakone, Kanagawa; Rakuten STAY VILLA Kamogawa in Kamogawa, Chiba; and Rakuten STAY VILLA Nikko in Nikko, Tochigi.

Q. Are lodging rates rising in the areas where the properties are located?

A. MetroEngines Research’s estimated settled ADR (trailing 12-month average) was ¥26,500 in Hakone (+3.6% YoY), ¥22,400 in Kamogawa (+5.9%) and ¥17,900 in Nikko (+2.4%), all above the prior year.

Methodology

Estimated settled ADR is the municipal median; as of September 2026 the number of properties covered was 186 in Hakone, 30 in Kamogawa and 121 in Nikko. The 12-month averages are simple averages of monthly values for October 2025–September 2026 and the same period a year earlier. Vacation-rental listed prices are area medians of per-room rates for 2 guests (tax-inclusive, all-plan average) and use a different basis from estimated settled ADR. Opening counts are on a listing-confirmed basis, with 2026 figures through early November. The 3 km room stock covers lodging facilities with 10 or more rooms (excluding leisure hotels) within 3,000 m of Rakuten STAY VILLA Hakone Sengokuhara; “active” refers to properties with confirmable selling prices on major booking sites in the last three months (September–November 2026) (as of November 3, 2026, MetroEngines Research tabulation). MetroEngines Research tracks about 168,000 properties in Japan and analyzes about 27,000 properties and about 1.26 million rooms confirmed active on OTAs. The gross yield estimates are reference values based on a simple annualization of the company’s outlook and do not represent actual rent or transaction terms.

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