Karma at Work

By delivering as per promised quality and timelines, vikas oberoi has transformed his father’s small firm into india’s second-most valued real estate developer.

- Aveek Datta

On a hot October day in 2015, around 400 people queued up in Borivali, in Mumbai’s western suburbs. No, they weren’t tech enthusiasts lined up in front of an Apple store to lay their hands on the latest iPhone. They were prospective home buyers, waiting outside a real estate developer’s sales office. Mumbai-based Oberoi Realty had just launched the sale of its new residential project, Oberoi Sky City, in the area, and they had turned up in droves.

No mean feat for a project that carries a minimum price tag of Rs 2.5 crore for an apartment. Not to mention the fact that four of the 10 residential towers planned were launched for sale, and in less than a year, 80 percent of the inventory of these four towers has already been sold.

“This is commendable in a scenario where the overall Mumbai property market remains sluggish, with most developers struggling to generate a good response to new launches,” says Adhidev Chattopadhyay, an analyst with Elara Capital, in a research note dated March 3, 2016. At that time, the inventory of unsold residential property in Mumbai had built up to 55 months of supply, according to the Elara report.

The response to the Borivali project wasn’t a one-off. A few months before Sky City, in January 2015, the developer had launched a residential project of twin towers in Mumbai’s eastern suburb of Mulund. Oberoi Realty has sold 80 percent of the inventory it launched for sale there as well.