Shajai Jacob, Director & Head - Marketing, JLL India

The role that International Property Consultancies (IPCs) play in a market like India magnifies significantly because of the massive amount of growth happening over a very vast arena. In a market still defined by significant lack of transparency, real estate consultancies play a complex and responsibility-driven role in all real estate transactions, especially in the case of high-value property assets. In large ticket sized transactions such as those involved in Grade an office spaces, there can be no margin for error. Transparency, ethics and accurate market information play an inalienable role in closing such deals.

Today, multi-national companies (MNCs) as well as domestic companies and investors depend on International Property consultancies (IPCs) to help them identify the right opportunities, analyze the risks, take charge of the overall portfolio and generate optimum returns on investment. IPCs bring to the table a potent combination of technical know-how and market insight across all verticals of real estate.

In India, IPCs help both domestic and MNC clients to formulate optimal real estate strategies in the Indian market, which functions within a complex and often confusing framework of policies and regulations. This coupled with the fact that they are hard-wired into the global market and operate from a standpoint of uncompromising ethics, is the value proposition offered by IPCs in India.

In a market like India, the role that IPCs play as transaction advisors and portfolio partners magnifies significantly because there is a massive amount of growth happening over a very vast arena. Their service offerings include office and residential brokerage, research, portfolio management, project management, property and facilities management as well as Capital Markets. IPCs also have deep capabilities to effectively execute disposition of surplus or distressed assets, address the requirements of HNIs and catalyze debt funding for developers. In addition, IPCs provide strategic business consulting for domestic clients and are invariably the default service providers for large Government real estate requirements.

Compared to more developed countries, the Indian real estate sector is less organized. However, it is again the cynosure of international investments thanks to the improving policy scenario for investments via FDI. This has naturally brought on the need for a global approach to local real estate, not least of all in terms of better information resources, the kind of business transparency that international investors expect and the ability to decipher information asymmetry via empirical investment research.

There are many ways of operating in Indian real estate, but global investors expect much more than knee-jerk reactions to currently existing market trends. They require their real estate advisors in India to provide and act upon insights based on a learned understanding of the market and advanced capabilities in anticipating possibilities.

IPCs in India provide this kind of knowledge, further backed by hands-on, practical experience in the Indian market. In fact, the role that IPCs play in a market like India magnifies significantly because of the massive amount of growth happening over a very vast arena.