To The Manor Born

Dayanand Pai, founder, and Ravindra Pai, MD, Century Real Estate, are steadily working their way at creating developments on the land banks they have bought over the last 50 years.

- Jayashree Kini Mendes

Intuition does not come to an unprepared mind, so goes the pithy saying. If you plant yourself indomitably on your instincts, and there abide, success will come to you. It’s with this hunch that Dayanand Pai and Satish Pai, founders of Century Real Estate conducted themselves way back in the 1970s at a time when real estate was a term not yet coined, even little used.

What started out as a livelihood has turned into a colossal business a couple of decades down the line. Today the mantle falls on Ravindra Pai, MD, Century Real Estate, and scion of the real estate business.

Interestingly, unbeknownst to the hoi polloi, Century Real Estate owns the largest land bank in Bengaluru, mainly (several thousands of acres spread within and outside the city). Ravindra understands the enormity of the responsibility that falls on him, but he hasn’t forgotten the legacy. With much modesty, he says, “In a way, we’ve been pioneers in the real estate scene in Bengaluru at a time when the city back then had a reputation as a pensioner’s paradise. Little did anyone foresee that real estate would go on to be such a large business here. And my father and uncle were entrepreneurs who had only just moved in. First-generation entrepreneurs were low on capital, so their business model started primarily by trading in land.”