01 · THE RALLY Rakumachi runs one product: the rakumachi.co.jp portal. As of January 2026, 487,000 individual investors use the site for free, and 5,459 brokerage agencies pay a monthly fee to list their income-producing properties on it. Three smaller revenue lines sit on top: a patented proposal feature that pushes off-market listings to investors who have told the site what they are looking for; a Premium subscription with extra tools (ARPU +17% YoY in H1 FY7/26); and tie-up video ads sold to property managers and financial institutions. OPM is high for two reasons. First, customer acquisition costs almost nothing — members find the site through twenty years of Japanese-search ranking and a YouTube channel that passed one billion cumulative views in late 2025. Second, the Premium subscription and the tie-up videos have pricing room. Outside the operating business sits a separate ¥4.08bn US-dollar bond portfolio (held to maturity, 5.5% average coupon, generating about ¥114M of interest income each H1). That interest lands below the operating line, so it does not lift OPM. And each yen invested in those bonds earns about a fifth of what the same yen would earn redeployed in the core business — so the portfolio is a drag on overall returns, not a tailwind, until management uses the cash for buybacks. The stock rose 3x from ¥492 on May 16, 2024 to ¥1,493 on September 16, 2025 on three disclosures. The FY7/24 annual results in September 2024 showed revenue up 13% to ¥2.36bn with OPM at 44.9%, and the company moved ¥4.17bn of cash into the new US-dollar bond portfolio. The FY7/25 annual results on September 12, 2025 showed revenue up 33.6% to ¥3.16bn and OP up 45.6% to ¥1.55bn, with OPM at 48.9%. The same day, the company announced founder Naohiro Sakaguchi's succession by Ryo Fujie, the head of marketing, plus a fourth buyback in twelve months of up to 500,000 shares and ¥750M.

02 · THE CONSOLIDATION From the September 2025 peak the stock fell by about a third over the next eight months, reaching ¥990 on March 13, 2026. The business itself kept doing well during this period. At the October 2025 annual shareholders' meeting, the board expanded from four directors to seven, adding two long-tenure department heads as inside members. The founder kept his 68.2% holding; what changed was that day-to-day operations now had more people between him and the next decision. The Q1 FY7/26 results in December 2025 and the H1 FY7/26 results in March 2026 each showed OP up 43.4% YoY on revenue up 14.9%. H1 OPM came in at 55.3% on cumulative sales of ¥1,757M. So the pullback was not about the company slowing down. The simpler reading is that the September 2025 peak — which more than tripled the May 2024 low of ¥492 — was reached on thin trading volume. Sakaguchi family ownership is 68.2%, the only other disclosed 5%+ holder is VIS Advisors at 5.08%, and the effective free float that institutional buyers can actually trade is about a quarter of the share count. A thin float lets a small flow of buying push the price a long way up, and it also lets a small slowing of that buying push the price most of the way back down.

03 · WHERE WE STAND NOW On May 25, 2026 the company filed two announcements at the same time. The first was a new buyback: up to 600,000 shares (3.09% of shares outstanding ex-treasury) for up to ¥500M, running through November 27, 2026. The second was a correction notice. The company restated the page-view figures it had reported in six prior filings, going back to the FY7/25 annual results. Importantly, the correction was only about page-view counts. No revenue or profit number was changed. The reason is simple: brokerages pay Rakumachi a flat monthly fee for each listing they post — they do not pay per page-view. So restating page-views does not change anything the company actually bills. The error itself grew with each later release. The FY7/25 annual page-view total was restated by −0.6%, the Q1 FY7/26 figure by −5.6%, and the H1 FY7/26 figure by −8.5%. After the correction, H1 FY7/26 YoY page-view growth falls from +23.2% to +12.7%. The company described the cause as an internal review of its page-view aggregation process and stopped there. The next four quarters will answer three questions. First, whether the company adds a clear explanation of how it now counts page-views, plus several years of restated monthly data, so the audience-growth picture can be checked against the underlying records. Second, whether the company starts using the ¥4.08bn it has parked in the US-dollar bond portfolio (about two-thirds of total assets, earning a fifth of what the same yen earns inside the operating business) to fund larger buybacks. Third, whether the niche moat is widening or maturing, as Japanese peers trade at 6.7x forward EV/EBIT against Rakumachi's 10.0x.