Over the last few years, the number of HNI investors and corporates who are seriously looking at investing into Indian office space has increased manifold. Mumbai continues to hold its own as India’s numero uno office space investment destination, with companies from all over the world unerringly zeroing in on the financial capital.
Ravi Sinha: You mean to suggest the land acquisition bill has not really been deliberated upon and came as a knee jerk reaction?
Ravi Sinha: I welcome all the panelists in this roundtable discussion. We are organizing the brain storming session for our inaugural yearly Handbook Focus 2012. This is the second of the series after the 1st discussion in Mumbai on “Funding Gap in Real Estate.”
Increasing population, higher expenditure on lifestyles, rising market of health insurance, Government initiatives for better medical infrastructure, and focus on Public Private Partnership (PPP) models are some of the driving factors for the growth of healthcare sector in India.
Ravi Sinha: To sum up the discussion, what kind of funding do you see emerging in the coming year?
Leasing and buying activity in the commercial real estate market in India remained sluggish for the first quarter ended March 31 of calendar year (CY) 2012. The total absorption of office space declined 12% in Q1 compared to the Q4 of CY 2011.
Sunil Dahiya: What is happening is that we imported certain professionals from other industries and somewhere the vision and mission of the promoter was fueled by their greed or professionalism. They called it financial engineering. And that was the reason we got blocked from the IPO market. Today, whoever has filed DRHP, is going to face so much scrutiny and the band value itself will be discounted by 30%.
Anmol Shah, the Gujarati businessman settled in Mumbai, has both the emotional as well as rational reasons to invest in property this time on Akshay Tritiya. His astrologer has suggested that very much like a few years back when he bought his first flat in Mumbai, followed by an office in one of the Central Business Districts (CBD) on Akshay Tritiya, he should yet again buy the second house on the auspicious day this year.
Sunil Dahiya: I will share a very personal experience. There was an IRS officer who was monitoring these IPOs at some level and said to me ‘Sunil you watch these IPOs, these are going to be windfall IPOs and then you will see watershed.
When the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) was to announce its annual monetary policy for 2012-13 on 17th April, there were widespread concerns of slowing economy, rising inflation, trade deficit of 4 per cent of GDP and drying FDI too emerging as a grace concerns