Gross leasing activity is recorded at 50 million square feet in 2018, highest in last eight years driven by buoyant leasing in Bengaluru and NCR. Compared to the previous year, gross leasing increased by 17% as occupiers continued to expand and consolidate. The top 3 sectors contributing to gross leasing were IT-ITeS with 43%, flexible workplaces with 14% and BFSI with 12% share.
The listing of India’s first REIT by Blackstone-backed Embassy Group has been in the offing for quite some time, but it now finally appears that it will be listed within the first half of 2019. As REITs await their official deployment in India, investors hoping to cash on this new avenue for generous ROI growth seek to understand what exactly is in store for them – and for the real estate market.
With high expectations from 2018, it was anticipated that the teething problems around policy initiative introduced in 2017 (RERA and GST) would ease out by the end of the year, bringing a new order of transparency and efficiency.
StayAbode Ventures has announced Asia’s largest co-living project in partnership with CP Developers. This will be the largest A grade co-living project in India with 1400 people living in a community environment, in the heart of Bengaluru’s Whitefield – a professional hub neighbouring ITPL and large MNCs with a working population of over 50,000 millennials.
India witnessed a robust demand for office spaces in Q3 2018, recording approximately 12.3 million sq ft of gross absorption, indicating a 23% growth over the corresponding period last year. As a result of rising demand coupled with lowering vacancies in premium Grade A buildings, the office rental values have recorded an increase in select micro markets across cities.
Mumbai’s Dharavi, one of the largest slums in Asia, has been an area of contention for almost two decades now. For all its revelations, the recent blockbuster film ‘Kaala’ only underscored what Mumbaikars, human rights activists, urban planners and real estate developers have known for decades – there is no simple formula for unravelling the complex Dharavi equation.
RERA was supposed to save the day for homebuyers, but that doesn’t seem to have happened – at least not yet. In many states RERA, in its present form, is currently either non-existent or a pale shade of what it was intended to be.
The Indian residential market volumes spiraled down in terms of demand and supply almost every successive year in this decade. From a high of 480,000 units in 2010, the supply last year stood at mere 103,000 units across the top 8 cities.
The ancient Chinese curse ‘may you live in interesting times’ certainly has a lot of pertinence to Indian real estate today. These are doubtlessly ‘interesting’ times for the sector, which has transformed significantly over the last decade. The pace of transformation has been accelerated further by the Central Government’s reformative steps aimed at ushering in ‘Acche Din’ to the realty sector.
Irony is that even though the sector has succedded to some extent in attracting the young talent by poaching on professionals from established and matured sectors like IT/ITeS, banking, finance and telecom etc, the retention of these professionals have been quite challenging.