Real estate market touches Rs 20k crore in South India

Bengaluru: South India’s real estate market has touched a significant milestone of Rs 20,000 crore in residential sales value, marking a decisive recovery from the pandemic phase, said M R Jaishankar, CMD, Brigade Group.

Delivering a keynote at the inauguration of CREDAI SouthCon 2026, the South India Knowledge Conclave held here on Friday, Jaishankar said South India still trails the all-India market in absolute scale due to the presence of much larger tier-2 cities in the North and West, including Ahmedabad, Lucknow, Indore and Kanpur. In contrast, South India’s Tier-2 powerhouses, notably Coimbatore, Kochi, Trivandrum and the rapidly advancing Visakhapatnam are now emerging as the primary growth engines for the region.

South India’s commercial real estate market has surpassed 2025 projections with modest space absorption: 2-4 million sq ft (office), 4-8 million sq ft (retail/mall), 8-12 million sq ft (warehousing), 5,000-8,000 hotel rooms and 10-30 MW data-centre capacity.

Giving a forecast for 2030, Jaishankar projected a stronger growth of 8-12 million sq ft (office), 15-20 million sq ft (retail/mall), 40-60 million sq ft (warehousing), 12,000-18,000 hotel rooms and 200-300 MW (data centres).

CREDAI Karnataka President Bhaskar T Nagendrappa said that while demand for apartments continues to rise post-COVID, affordability is deteriorating because the long-standing Rs 45-lakh cap no longer matches today’s construction and land costs.

CREDAI has urged the government to revise this definition, expand unit size limits, reduce GST on construction to 5% and stamp duty to 2-3% to make affordable housing viable through faster approvals and PPP-based land support, he said.

Although they insisted delivery delays are largely a thing of the past due to regulatory reforms, they also admitted that permissions, E-khata processes and power connections continue to face bureaucratic bottlenecks that push up finance costs and slow handovers.