NextGen' of real estate steadily taking the helm

- Pratik Kataria

Director (Sainath Developers - The House of Kataria) & President, NextGen Committee, NAREDCO Maharashtra

The real estate sector in India is the second largest employment generator, the third largest sector in terms of FDI flow, and a major contributor to the country's overall economic development. Even post-pandemic, it was one of the first sectors to bounce back and return to normalcy. As per CIRIL's April 2022 report, it is expected to touch Rs 65,000 crore by 2024-25 and contribute to 13 percent of the country's total GDP.  

Along with a constant and strong growth trajectory, the sector is also demonstrating some new trends, and the most eye-catching one is the participation of the young generation in their family-run property businesses. In India, most real estate companies are family managed businesses since generations.

However, till a few years ago, the progenies of the promoters of these companies weren't very keen on joining their businesses due to multiple reasons like dearth of growth opportunities. The common perception that the sector is unorganised and most importantly because most of us think a lot of legwork is required to successfully run a real estate business. As a result, most young people wanted to step out of their family-run property business and looked for a career elsewhere.

Interestingly, a major shift in this paradigm is witnessed now with an increasing number of youths becoming a part of their family-run real estate business. A lot of youngsters even complete their graduation from abroad and come back to take their businesses to new heights.

One of the major reasons of this change is how the sector shaped in the past few years. In just about a decade, there have been significant amount of policy and structural changes to strengthen the realty sector. Some major changes are the formation of Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 and GST, to name a few. This altercation not only made the sector more streamlined but also infused transparency and accountability into the system, thus adding thrust to the sector's growth trajectory and opening new prospects for both domestic as well as international investors.

Furthermore, the pandemic opened new avenues for the digital transformation of the sector. What was once considered one of the most conventional sectors became one of the pioneers to adapt to some of the most advanced tools and technologies in the sector, like Fractional Ownership, Data Analysis based on Artificial Intelligence and also improving the efficiency of a project with the help of Machine Learning.

NextGen nowadays are more inclined towards learning and exploring the development of new asset classes in real estate and that is the reason why we have many such asset classes mushrooming in our neighbourhood, like student housing, senior living, data centres, co-living, etc.

The entire value chain of the industry has been restructured as all the stakeholders of a project from architects, designers, engineers, building material suppliers, contractors, maintenance companies are looking to modernise their way of functioning. The artificial intelligence and software systems aided an array of engineering and designing functions including 3-dimensional floor plans and building structures.

The concept of Green Buildings is also generating a lot of interest from the young minds, who nowadays, look forward towards having a project which has a sustainable and environment friendly ecosystem.

All this has given a much-needed facelift to India's real estate sector attracting the youth that now sees a great deal of potential to work with. This new shift in the mindset has encouraged the youth to take up the reins in most companies in India's real estate sector, who have newer ideas to develop and sky rocketing ambitions to achieve and eventually have a better value for their time and money that they invest.

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