AI & Robotics companies accounted for 21% of Bengaluru’s absorption in Q2 2024, as per Vestian’s quarterly office market report, The Connect Q2 2024. Rapid global advancement of artificial intelligence, combined with a supportive ecosystem, has significantly driven the demand for office space in the city. Overall, IT-ITeS sector, including AI & Robotics, accounted for 69% of the city’s absorption in Q2 2024.
In a bid to assess whether India’s data centre capacity will meet the nation’s growing digital needs, Cushman & Wakefield has come out with a report, “Is India Building Enough to Power its Digital Transformation?”. The report conservatively estimates the potential data centre capacity India will require to align with other major economies. The findings reveal a potential for an additional 1.7-3.6 GW data centre capacity, over and above the planned development of 2.32 GW Colo capacity, taking the potential of possible data centre capacity to over 5 GW.
With its localized nature of business, along with the fact that historically there had been information asymmetry, Indian real estate for quite some time lacked focus on brand goodwill. Size of the real estate companies for long was seen as synonymous with big brands. With the emergence of India as one of the five key global real estate markets post the introduction of FDI in 2005, with US, UK, China and Middle East being other four geographies, the focus shifted to brand building for the first time. Track2Realty analyses how brand equity has historically been a market-linked evolution.
Despite an increase in the share of commercial investments to 42% in Q1 2024 from 39% a year earlier, they declined by 52% in value terms. Similarly, the share of residential investments also increased to 41% in Q1 2024 from 27% in Q1 2023. However, investments declined by 33% annually in value terms. Investments significantly decreased by 73% in the industrial and warehousing sector in Q1 2024 over the previous year.
The concept of “Shared Economy” got severely tested during the peak of the pandemic. Factors such as uncertain economic conditions resulting in loss of jobs, work from home and the shift of migrant population to their respective hometowns in the wake of the Covid-19 outbreak brought the evolving Co-Living sector to an immediate halt.
The real estate developers across the country might be living in denial but the distress sale is a predominant reality in the Indian housing market. More and more Indian home buyers are actually getting better deals in the resale market. This is leading to a stressful situation for the developers reeling with the inventory overhang and yet not ready to cut down the prices.
Colliers International foresees robust demand from GICs, with leasing by GICs across six major cities in India to be in the range of 32.5 million sq ft between 2019 and 2021. Over 2014-2018, occupiers leased about 53.0 million sq ft of office space in multi-tenanted buildings for their GICs. Bengaluru led the demand with about 20.1 million sq ft, followed by Delhi NCR and Hyderabad. Further, we found that companies from the engineering, energy and manufacturing sectors favoured Bengaluru, which accounted for 32% of GIC demand between 2014-2018.
Construction for 4.9 million units has begun and 2.6 million units of which have been completed. Given the past trend, additional 1.64 million houses are likely to be sanctioned by December 2019, making it highly possible to achieve the 10 million houses target by 2022. Projected subsidy disbursement over next 3 year for the same is projected to INR 1 trillion.
Jhumur Ghosh welcomed the panelists, following which Ravi Sinha questioned the global competitiveness of Indian real estate in the wake of thousands of abandoned projects waiting for the funds, the debt-equity ratio imbalance, lending issues, pre-launches without RERA sanctions, and the developers’ defending the indefensible.
Can Indian real estate bridge the gap between the promise and the performance? Can Indian residential market attract as much investment as its commercial real estate? Will the global funds trust the Indian residential real estate? There are more questions than ever and it is time to settle these question marks over the business of real estate.