The current market slowdown, probably, opens up opportunities for realty players in the country to lockup land parcels and equip themselves to broadbase their operations, says Birla Estates, a Kumar Mangalam Birla-owned realty firm.
Real estate is comparatively a new business for the highly diversified business conglomerate and it forayed into the space, just three years ago, by setting up Birla Estates, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Century Textiles and Industries Limited (CTIL), the flagship venture of the group.
Birla Estates said it has a mandate to develop a valuable-owned portfolio of over 200 acres of land across Mumbai Metropolitan Region, Pune, Bengaluru & Delhi NCR markets in the next five years.
Explaining the rationale behind the group's active foray into the realty sector when the market is already flooded with unsold inventory, Birla Estates CEO K. T Jithendran told The Hindu that: “We believe that we can make a difference with our pricing, the style, the touch, the comfort, overall feeling, traffic-free environment, easy access, green factor and other eco-friendly elements including water conservation/harvesting. Tastefully designed homes will always have buyers. We want to play in that niche.”
Birla Estates said buyer responses to its maiden residential project, Birla Vanya, a 21-acre venture at Kalyan in Mumbai, was quite overwhelming. “In three days into the launch in April this year we sold 450 homes in the Rs 50 lakh to 1 Cr range. We have 21-acres of land here and the second phase launched next year,” he said.
Another project is coming on a 30-acre patch of land in Worli, and it would be a mixed-use venture with residential, retail and commercial.
The company on Wednesday forayed into the southern market by announcing Birla Alokya, in Whitefield, a premium micro-market in Bengaluru. Birla Alokya, that comes with 3&4 bed homes in the range of 2000 to 3800 sqft and priced at Rs 1.2 crore to 2.5 crore, will be launched later this month. The company said there would be only 28 units per acre with a lot of free space in between.
Mr. Jithendran said his company was exploring an innovative home format, Vilament, in Bengaluru on a chunk of 8-acres of land (recently purchased at Rs 66 crore). “It's like having the luxury of a vila at the cost of a flat that comes with security and all amenities of a gated community.”
Birla Estates has signed another joint development agreement to develop a residential property on a five-acre land owned by Subhadra Textile Mill on Magadi Road. “We are currently in the process of finalising designs and doing buyer market research for this project,” he added.
