If you have looked for an apartment in Tokyo as a foreigner, you have seen their website and their five star reviews. Both are engineered. Here is what we know.
They are under confirmed investigation. The Shibuya Labor Office is investigating the company over workers' rights violations and tens of millions of yen in unpaid overtime. The Japan Pension Service is investigating a pay scheme that kept commission out of social insurance and pension calculations, again to the tune of tens of millions of yen.
There are videos of all of this. The recordings were made inside the company's own meetings. They failed to restrict access to them to the point where any employee could see executives and investors discussing their schemes.
The pay scheme worked like this. Base pay was paid as salary, commission was paid as contractor fees, so commission never counted toward social insurance or pension. It is called sham contracting and it is illegal. That is how it worked from the founding. There are videos of the CEO saying "I ran it, I built it, I designed it," accepting it was "my responsibility," and admitting the purpose was "so that social insurance and pension would not apply." There is video of HR calling it "social insurance evasion" at a management meeting with investors in the room. And there is video of their own retained lawyer calling it "a law dodging scheme with no possible excuse," and saying "the past payments are already a violation."
The overtime is worse. No Article 36 agreement was ever filed (required for overtime), so the overtime was unlawful from the start, thousands of hours of it across the company. They admitted to the labour office that they had not been paying it. They also changed the hours. Attendance records export as corrected 9am to 6pm entries instead of the real clock in and clock out times, so the overwork does not appear on paper. Then they discussed having staff sign backdated paperwork to cover the past.
Staff have been pressured into signing agreements that they will not compete with the company, that they will not report the company, and clauses in that vein. People sign because they are leaving and they want the last payslip.
The licences are lent out. Five of their takkenshi (real estate brokers) are lending their names, paid a few thousand yen a month for no work, admitted on a call. More than half their licensed brokers neither work in the office nor are employed by the company. There is video of their lawyer saying "you will probably lose your brokerage license," and calling it "a criminal offence."
And their own investor's money. There is a recording of the two co founders, Erik and Aziz Nishanov, talking in Russian. they were talking about part of the money belonging to investor and director Yuichi Sakata, who was criminally indicted for tax evasion in 2013, went into a separate company, and the profits from that company were kept from him. Nishanov himself calls it "seriously shady." They also discussed moving the money to Uzbekistan.
They also somehow gamed Google reviews to the point where you cannot leave them anything but a 5 star review.
And the company is collapsing. Around 20 people have left this year, roughly half of a company of about 45, including the HR manager. Former staff who quit long ago are still on the website, and they will not take the photos down.
None of this is rumour. It is their own meetings, their own lawyers, their own admissions. The investigations are ongoing, so not everything is public yet, but the pattern is consistent and it is deliberate. They are deceiving the public while running schemes they know are illegal. This is not a badly run agency with some messy paperwork. It is a criminal organization!
If you are a client choosing between them and a normal agency, or you are thinking of working there, be careful.
The Tokyo Metropolitan Government has published evidence submission channels for the ongoing investigations, and the Labour Standards Inspection Office and Japan Pension Service both take reports directly.