Singapore-listed technology park developer Ascendas is close to acquire an IT Special Economic Zone of Shriram Properties in Chennai for about Rs 500 crore, said banking sources close to the development. Ascendas, which owns a string of business parks in India, is said to have pipped competing offers from other global investors Tishmen Speyer, Xander Group and Mapletree, a real estate arm of Temasek.
It is a latter-day fact that project development on the outskirts of Indian metros begins before the necessary infrastructure has been put down. This happens because demand for developed spaces in cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai is high enough to make even hastily established projects financially feasible for developers.
Indian realty firm Synergy Property Development Services Ltd bagged, through international bidding, a $153-million township development project in the central African country of Rwanda.
Real estate-focused Private Equity Funds are looking at investing in pre-leased commercial projects, including IT Parks and Special Economic Zones (SEZs), as they look for assured returns from their investments.
Spiraling property prices and slump in home sales have forced the Union Housing Ministry to think out-of-the-box solutions. After the decision to set up a high-level committee to recommend policy interventions to facilitate creation of rental housing stocks, the ministry has now sought views from private developers and builders to evolve a strategy for reducing the time taken in approval of real estate projects that can help bring down the cost of houses.
Indian real estate companies, which borrowed heavily during the peak of the economic cycle and rosy business forecast, are now caught in the vortex of piling debt post-slowdown. Most of the realtors who went on a land bank acquisition with borrowed money are struggling to repay even the interest and banks look reluctant to restructure the debt any more.
Over the last year, there has been an unequivocal crystallization of Indian cities that continue to attract serious investment into real estate. This is directly correlated to the economic dynamics now working in the country. If India is to achieve even a conservative GDP growth of 6% per year, it emerges that only three cities – Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore – have the potential to deliver. The reason for this is that close to 2/3rd of the overall development of office space in the country is now taking place in Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore.
There was no holistic planning for SEZs to position them strategically for being complementary to each other and serving their own market niches respectively. The Ministry of Commerce that provides in-principle approvals to new SEZs on the basis of pre-feasibility reports being submitted by the respective state governments, soon seem to have lost its monitoring mechanism. Secondly, the SEZ was not synchronized with other schemes for development of specialized industrial parks.
Jones Lang LaSalle’s markets experts have shared their expectations for the office leasing markets in Asia Pacific in the second quarter of 2012. In those markets that were experiencing office rental declines in previous quarters, the Markets teams are anticipating a slowdown in the rate of decline, for example a three to four percent fall in Grade A office rents this quarter in Hong Kong compared to an actual 6.3 percent decline in the first quarter.
Being blamed for being a haven for black money cartel, realty players broke their silence and instead tried to put the blame on the government for not introducing the desired reforms in the sector. However, they did not spell out if reforms are prerequisite to check the cartel of black money in the sector, why are they opposing the realty bill and a regulator.