In a trend line seen with other foreign companies, a giant logging and wood processing company based in Tokyo is increasingly making itself known in U.S. homebuilding circles.
Last month it was announced that Sumitomo Forestry, which is extensively involved in the construction of wooden houses throughout Japan, as well as China and South Korea, has nearly closed on the purchasing of one of the largest home construction companies in the U.S.
That company is Tri Pointe Homes Incorporated, which is based in Irvine, California. The reported price tag: $4.5 billion.
As it now stands, notes the website Nikkei Asia: “Sumitomo Forestry has laid a foundation for growth in the U.S.” Reports the Wall Street Journal, the deal will make Sumitomo Forestry “the sixth-largest home builder in America.”
Put another way, the company has seen its share of the U.S. home construction single-family market grow from well under 1% a decade ago to around 6% now.
The more than 300-year-old Sumitomo, which only started to build real estate from its own lumber in 1964, last year merged the Rockville, Maryland-based DRB Group and Brightland Homes of Dallas in an effort to expand its footprint into Arizona, Colorado, Tennessee, and Texas.
At the time of that merger, in March of last year, Atsushi Iwasaki, president of Sumitomo, said the decision to bring the two companies together “will generate many synergies and exciting new growth for both sides.”
The company has said that it hopes to build upwards of 22,000 homes in the U.S. on an annual basis within the next four years.
That goal is a part of Sumitomo’s earlier announced Mission Treeing 2030 which, in a larger effort emphasizing sustainability, is seeing the company “engaged in a broad range of businesses centered on wood, including forestry management, distribution, wooden building construction, and biomass power generation.”
June 15, 2026
By Garry Boulard
