Sekisui House

Establishment and domestic development

Sekisui Chemical entered the housing business in March 1960 and began selling its prefabricated Sekisui House A-type model the following month. On 1 August 1960, the business was spun off as Sekisui House Sangyo Co., Ltd., with capital of ¥100 million. An A-type house was exported to Australia in November of that year. The company adopted its present name in 1963.

Sekisui House was listed on the second sections of the Tokyo and Osaka stock exchanges in 1970, moving to their first sections in 1971, and was listed on the Nagoya Stock Exchange in 1972. It moved its headquarters to the Umeda Sky Building, which it jointly owns, in 1993; its cumulative number of homes built reached one million that year.

In August 1995, the company absorbed Sekisui House Mokuzo Co., Ltd. and concurrently began its SHAWOOD wooden-housing business. The absorbed company had formerly been Toyodo Construction, in which Sekisui House acquired a capital interest in 1984, and had been renamed Sekisui House Mokuzo in 1989. In 2000, it unified its low-rise rental-housing products under the Sha Maison brand.

Sekisui House entered a business alliance with Konoike Construction and a capital alliance with Konoike's parent, Otori Holdings, in 2015. Otori became an equity-method affiliate in 2016 after Sekisui House acquired a 33.3% voting interest. In October 2019, Sekisui House increased the interest to 51.8%, making Otori and Konoike consolidated subsidiaries.

In February 2024, the group reorganized eight domestic construction subsidiaries under the wholly owned intermediate holding company Sekisui House Construction Holdings, Ltd. The parent company transferred the operations of its Construction Business Headquarters to the holding company through an absorption-type company split.

International expansion

Sekisui House announced its entry into the Australian housing market in 2009. In 2010, it purchased the contract-building division of Australian homebuilder and developer AVJennings. In 2011, Sekisui House and Frasers Property formed an equal joint venture to develop the majority of the A$2 billion Central Park mixed-use project in Sydney.

The company reported that by 31 December 2025 it had delivered 14,326 homes in Australia and undertaken projects with an aggregate development value of more than A$18 billion. In 2026, SHINKA House II, a SHAWOOD spec home in southwestern Sydney, received the Housing Industry Association's Australian Spec Home award.

In the United States, Sekisui House began real-estate development projects in 2010 and later expanded into homebuilding. It acquired Woodside Homes in 2017 and made Holt Homes a wholly owned subsidiary in January 2022. It agreed in June 2022 to acquire Chesmar Homes, which became a wholly owned subsidiary the following month, and acquired the homebuilding business and assets of Hubble Homes in 2023.

Sekisui House's domestic operations include custom-built detached houses; rental housing and commercial buildings; architectural and civil engineering; rental-housing management; remodeling; and residential and urban development. Its overseas business consists principally of homebuilding and residential development in the United States and Australia, with additional development activity in Singapore. S&P Global Ratings described the company in 2026 as a leading Japan-based prefabricated homebuilder, estimating annual construction of about 8,000 detached houses and more than 20,000 rental units.

The company's fiscal year ends on 31 January. For FY2025, the year ended 31 January 2026, it reported net sales of ¥4.198 trillion, operating profit of ¥341.4 billion and profit attributable to owners of the parent of ¥232.1 billion.

Custom detached houses

In Japan, Sekisui House offers custom detached houses through three principal factory-engineered structural systems. Its light-gauge steel Dynamic Frame System, used for one- and two-storey houses, employs reinforced beams to reduce the need for internal columns. Its heavy-gauge steel Flexible β System is used principally for three- and four-storey houses and other buildings where larger openings and flexible layouts are required.

Wooden houses are sold under the SHAWOOD brand. SHAWOOD uses factory-cut laminated-timber posts and beams joined with proprietary metal connectors rather than conventional American light timber framing. Trade publications have noted that the post-and-beam system permits wide openings and open-plan interiors, while factory cutting and numbered components reduce on-site cutting and construction waste. Although the structural components are factory-engineered, the company markets the houses as individually designed rather than restricted to preset floor plans.

2017 land fraud and governance dispute

In 2017, Sekisui House lost approximately ¥5.5 billion (about US$51 million at the time) in an attempted purchase of a roughly 2,000 m2 (22,000 sq ft) site in Gotanda, Tokyo. A woman posing as the owner used a forged passport, and the company's application to register ownership was rejected. Ten people were subsequently prosecuted for offences including fraud and the use of forged documents, and all received guilty verdicts.

The fraud also prompted a governance dispute. At a January 2018 board meeting, then-chairman Isami Wada proposed removing president Toshinori Abe; the motion failed, and Wada subsequently stepped down as chairman. In 2020, Wada and then-director Fumiyasu Suguro proposed a slate of 11 directors, but shareholders rejected the proposal. A shareholder derivative lawsuit seeking damages from two former representative directors was dismissed by the Osaka District Court in May 2022; the Osaka High Court dismissed the shareholder's appeal that December. The case received renewed international attention after the 2024 release of the Netflix drama series Tokyo Swindlers, whose fictional story was widely associated with the fraud.