The report “India’s Real Estate Market Outloo 2016” is part of CBRE’s Asia Pacific Markets Outlook Report series. CBRE forecasts that Asia Pacific’s steady economic growth will continue to outpace the rest of the world in 2016.
At about US$151 per sq. ft. per annum, Delhi’s Central Business District (CBD) of Connaught Place was ranked as the sixth most expensive prime office market in the world, according to CBRE Research’s semi-annual Global Prime Office Occupancy Costs survey.
Today, the world sees India as a land of opportunity for business and investment. RBI head Raghuram Rajan said in mid-September that while fellow BRICs have deep problems, India appears to be an island of relative calm in an ocean of turmoil.
Private Equity funds, famously known as PEs are invested heavily in the Indian real estate. Even though the sector is emerging only gradually from its slowdown, this could be the golden period of PE investments to invest further, as the opportunities being offered are humungous.
The IT/ITeS sector has clearly been driving corporate real estate in the country; and consequently, much of the development in this space is being propelled by IT and back-office demand for workspaces, as per CBRE’s India report – Real Estate & Workplace Strategies of Shared Services Occupiers.
Haryana Government would like to address it as pro-farmer move, the real estate sector would like to hail it as investment friendly and others within the built environment of real estate would like to call it a step that would bring to the market more supply and hence affordability.
From being the governance wild child to maturing into a market influencer, India’s real-estate sector has transformed in the past decade, with a paradigm shift from family owned businesses to corporates along with a few companies listing on stock exchanges. The change began with the government opening doors to Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in 2005 and then welcoming the next wave of stability as corporate houses brought image restoration for the sector. Led by corporate entities, realty companies soon adopted corporate governance wherein transparency began to trickle down into the system as a norm slowly.
“How long can a sector survive which is borrowing at 48 per cent from private lenders to serve the interest of previous debt raised at much lower rate,” asks a banker. His concern is not without valid reasons. Developers experimented with all funding options but still many of them are now being forced to seek other sources of funding which not only comes at a significantly higher cost but also where the source of fund is unregulated.
Over the past decade, the Pune hotel sector has emerged a formidable competitor to other the hospitality markets in the country, growing from a negligible base of branded hotel rooms in 2005 into becoming one of India’s top five hotel markets in 2014. Over the course, it has weathered multiple storms ranging from significant supply increases to multiple bouts of economic uncertainty, both globally and regionally.
The stock market is not only showing the investors’ confidence index going up. It is also indicating the way forward for the Indian real estate. After all, investor sentiment on the bourses have often led to the recovery of the real estate market as the investment grows to the next level of confidence for a long term investment. It may be too early for concluding whether the stock recovery is here to stay and lead to revival of the fortunes of the real estate, yet Track2Realty finds the debate has gained ground. While the developers are optimistic about the money sooner than later coming into the sector, the critics have their own reasons to advice wait & watch policy, if not outright denial.