Indian Commercial Realty Market Achieving Stability

Pinecrest Real Estate Market Report 2009
Real Estate Intelligence Services (REIS) which is a division of Jones Lang LaSalle Meghraj released a report which said that stability in the commercial real estate market of India is observed with the economic recovery of India.

According to the report, although in 2010, the landscape will be beneficial for tenents, but in 2011, influence of landlords will be higher. It implies that since the office rents are beginning to hit the ground, in the coming term, they should be proactively looking to lock in attractive leases.

Abhishek Kiran Gupta, the Associate Director JLLM said in the report that the Indian commercial realty market is about to attain stability with the well going economic recovery of India.

Commercial Realty unable to seek Buyers

Commercial National Bank
Due to the continuous oversupply of the commercial projects, the signs of pickup in demand in the sector seems becoming dull and thus banks are also backing out from lending to real estate firms.

As compared to the residential sector, the demand growth of the commercial sector in past few months is much behind that of the residential one. Not only the office spaces are yet to be occupied, but also the ready projects are unable to seek buyers. This lack of buyer’s interest in the office spaces, multiplexes and retail has forced banks to back off lending to commercial sector.

Other than the uncertain demand scenario for commercial space, banks also have to look and take care of the rising realty sector debt on their ledgers. Ranjan Dhawan, the chief general manager of Punjab National Bank (PNB) said that since some of the banks have reached their sectoral exposure limit, they cannot now get into more lending. He also added that although PNB is still in is exposure limit, still it would get into some other lending only after thorough due-diligence.

Commercial realty back to its position

After long time of stagnation in the commercial real estate market in Mumbai, there is finally some revival. First off the block was the 10.3-acre Finlay Mill property for which there have been bids from Lodha Developers and Indiabulls Real Estate. On July 31, NTC will put the 16-acre Kohinoor Mill-1 property also on the block, for which the base price will be Rs 1,200 crore. Both these properties are in central Mumbai.
In the case of Finlay Mill property, the last day for the submission of bids was Thursday. Lodha Developers and Indiabulls Real Estate have put in their bids. The base price for this property, which has a buildable area of 4.20 lakh square feet, is Rs 708 crore with Lodha’s bid at Rs 657.9 crore and Indiabulls’ at Rs 520 crore. The property was put on block twice earlier.
It is learnt that property consultant Jones Lang LaSalle Meghraj has been mandated for the sale of the Kohinoor Mill-1 land. This is the first time that this land is being put on the block. The Kohinoor Mill-1 property is different from that of Kohinoor Mill-3, which was bought by Manohar Joshi and Raj Thackeray for Rs 421 crore in 2005.