Irfan Razack, Chairman and Managing Director of Prestige Group, is unambiguous about where the market stands. “We exceeded our guidance handsomely and crossed the 30K mark for the overall year, which I believe is a very big high for the housing sales for our company and that shows the health of the market also,” he says in an interview to ET NOW.
The momentum has carried into April. A large launch this weekend, Prestige Golden Grove, a major development at Tellapur in Hyderabad, drew strong demand. “There has been great demand. I do not see any sort of let up or any sort of slowdown in demand at all as far as residential sales are concerned,” Razack says.
His focus now is on supply, not demand. “Our only endeavour will always be to see how we can bring in better inventory in good locations so that we can keep up the same momentum and sustain the sales growth,” he adds.
The ₹1–3 Crore Band: Where the Real Volume Lives
Razack is pointed about where the real action in housing lies, and it is not in the luxury segment that has dominated headlines. “Between a crore and three crores has become the sweet spot which is selling at quite good volume and velocity,” he says, adding that he expects that dynamic to continue.
Luxury real estate, he cautions, is a niche play. “You cannot sell luxury every day, all the time. It is a very small market – it gets you value but it does not give you those volumes.” For developers chasing scale, the mid-income and lower mid-income segments are where the numbers are made.
Sub-₹1 crore housing also holds demand, Razack says, but the challenge is arithmetic: land costs, construction costs, and location constraints make it difficult to price projects in that range while remaining viable. “If we do have a development which we are able to offer sub-₹1 crore at a good location, I think even that will be a sellout overnight. But that is a big balance that we have to do.”
GCCs Fuelling High-Pay Jobs and Housing Demand
Underpinning residential demand, Razack points to the structural engine of Global Capability Centres. Office absorption across India has hit a record of nearly 100 million square feet over the year, he notes, with vacancy levels at single digits or lower across developers in the office market.
The link to housing is direct: GCCs create high-paying jobs, and those jobs create homebuyers. “Once GCCs are coming in, occupying space, creating jobs, and these are high paid jobs, automatically the demand for housing goes,” Razack says.
Not everything is frictionless. Input costs have risen sharply over the past two months, and Razack acknowledges the hit. But he is characteristically sanguine. “Water should find its level and things should stabilise,” he says, adding that the timing remains uncertain.
For existing projects, the impact is ring-fenced as those are fixed-price contracts. The cost risk falls on new launches. “If the costs go up too high, ultimately it will tell on the price, and then the customer has to bear that additional cost, only for the newer sales,” he says.
Data Centres: The Next Growth Frontier
Beyond residential and office, Razack flags data centres as a significant emerging opportunity. Prestige has already completed a data centre project in Bengaluru as a general contractor and has signed MOUs for data centre developments in Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, with more planned in Bengaluru.
“I believe there is a lot of scope for data centres and that is the future,” he says.
With conflict in West Asia unsettling markets, the question of whether NRI investment money might shift from Dubai back to India has gained currency. Razack pushes back on the idea of a sharp or immediate reallocation. “Real estate is not so elastic that you just move like a stock market, after all, it is rigid,” he says. NRIs have historically invested in both India and the UAE and will likely continue to do so. Any current hesitation, he believes, is temporary. “Everything will be forgotten once things stabilise,” he says.