Real Estate Gurgaon

Wachovia Corp, one of the largest diversified financial institutions in the US, has bought a 15 per cent stake in real estate Gurgaon-based major Vipul Ventures for Rs 234 crore. “These funds from Wachoiva will be used for a slew of projects Vipul has in the pipeline,” said Vipul managing director Punit Beriwala. The company is developing around 2 million sq ft of commercial space in and around Gurgaon, including a 150-acre IT special economic zone (SEZ) and a 100-acre township in Faridabad. “Vipul expects to generate a turnover of Rs 6,000 crore over the next five years for which the company will invest nearly Rs 2,000 crore,” Beriwala said.

Explaining the deal, Wachovia director (real estate capital markets) Sandip Kundu said, “This year Wachovia will invest nearly $2 billion in Asia, of which China and India are the main markets.” Wachovia Corp is the holding company of Wachovia Bank, the fourth-largest bank by assets in the US with assets of $706 billion. Kundu said that if the opportunities are right, the total investment in India in 2007 may be as high as $1.5 billion as capital is not a constraint. This is Wachovia’s first investment in a listed company in India. It has already made seven project-level investments in the 11 months it has been in India, though Kundu refused to give the names of the unlisted firms.

Commenting on India’s real estate market, Kundu said, “Prices may have risen high in several metros, but salaries, and hence affordability, have also risen. With high unfulfilled demand in housing, the fundamental picture remains strong for the next few years.”

Source://indianexpress.com

Golfing honchos, MK Trishal and Shoban Roy, ruled the team category in the second leg of The Economic Times Leaders Challenge Golf Tournament, played at the Golden Greens Club, here on Sunday. The winning team tallied 85 stableford points while the team of Rohit Jhawar and Vicky Shaw edged out the team of SS Bali and Anil Rajput, to grab the number 2 slot, after both teams were tied at 75 points.

The event was played on a 3/4th stableford format divided into two handicap categories, 0-14 and 15-20. The event was inaugurated by leading Bollywood actress Mahima Chowdhary. The prizes were given away jointly by Rajan Mudaliar, managing director, Color Plus and Tarun Mehrotra, head (business development), Emaar MGF. In the individual handicap 0-14 category, Amit Luthra triumphed with 41 stableford points, while BR Punj clinched the 15 and above category with 48 points.

The tournament will visit Kolkata, Bangalore and Chennai before culminating in a grand finale. Organised by leading business daily, The Economic Times, the event was managed by Tiger Sports Marketing. The Economic Times Leaders Challenge Golf Tournament was presented by Color Plus, and co-sponsored by Emaar MGF. The co-sponsors were Mitsubishi Motors, Black Dog, Srixon, Kingfisher Premium, art d’ Inox and Kingfisher Airlines. The Economic Times has always been a leader in the field of business news.

Through ‘The Economic Times Leaders Challenge Golf Tournament’, the daily aims to set up a niche platform for its target audience to interact in what is a competitive yet relaxed environment. The Economic Times aims to put together what they aim to make India’s No 1 invitational golf tournament and a trendsetter unto itself.

While Kensaku Konishi, president & CEO, Canon India, felt the course played faster than the one he’s used to in Hong Kong, he said the second time round, he’d be prepared to improve upon his score of 88. Girish Rao, senior vice-president, LG Electronics, was all praise for the way the event was organised. “This is an attempt to get truly corporate golfers since I expect to see golfers like me who play only on weekends,” said Mr Rao, sporting a decent 24 handicap.

The second leg of ‘The Economic Times Leaders Challenge Golf Tournament’ featured the who’s who in the Delhi corporate circle, including Sushil Ansal, chairman, Ansal Properties and Industries; Sunil Dutt, V-P (sales), Nokia; Lloyd Mathias, director (marketing), Motorola; Girish Rao, senior V-P, LG Electronics; Prem Bhatia, MD, Sports Media; Harvijay Singh, MD, Hits Exports; Kaushik Dutta, partner, PWC; Shoban Roy, president, Bacardi Martini India; Abhishek Mishra, head (lifestyle), Unitech; Anil Rajput, V-P (corporate affairs), ITC; Manu Anand MD, Frito Lay and Rajive Suri, chairman, Impulse, among others.

Resource://indiatimes.com

Gurgaon real estate is a vast adolescent that stands in the glow of new paint. Luminous glass buildings, stout bustling malls and gigantic hives of apartments named after lords, knights and birds are spread over green lawns that people from Bombay would call parking.

It is unmistakably the colony of the young, its marketplaces and restaurants teeming with EMI couples and their 'we-two-ours-two' children, and in the pale background, a dark melancholic Bihari maid.

Across this district that has no clear perimeter anymore, work is in progress. It's more than just Delhi's satellite now.

Many more buildings are rising and piers are becoming bridges. There is no evidence here of any other time but the present, though Dronacharya is rumoured to have been born in one of the hamlets.

The hint that a different population once lived in Gurgaon arrives sometimes in dramatic ways. A housewife in Nirvana, a posh residential area, recalls the appearance of a rustic woman at her doorsteps.

"I thought she wanted a job as a maid but then I realised she wanted to buy a house." And there lies the deeper story of Gurgaon's hidden but fortunate natives.

Scions of the nomadic shepherds and farmers who once settled in Gurgaon and grew bajra, jowar and mustard in their arid lands, are today sudden beneficiaries of a spectacular revolution.

The rise of the BPOs in the last decade, the coming of other service industries, and the brute force of builder enterprise have converted almost worthless farmlands into properties that now fetch one to eight crore rupees per acre, a 500 fold increase over the last ten years in a generalisation.

Landed farmers who till recently earned about Rs 15,000 per acre a year through farming, are millionaires now even by dollar standards.

And the carnival is only intensifying. Last year, over 800 acres of land were transacted. Big builders already own 10,000 acres in Gurgaon and they are buying more.

In the delirium of sudden affluence, farmers are buying cars like the Skoda or Ford Endeavour on full down payment. Enchanted by the real estate industry, many are becoming land brokers. Some are lost to drinking and gambling.

Women who used to wake up at four in the morning to finish household work, have today discovered bed tea. They even call it "bed tea".

When two neighbours now cross each other in the lane, there is a silent duel in their minds to decide who would say "Ram Ram" first.

"The man who is poorer should greet first," a farmer says of the new etiquette. Villagers who till recently came together to conduct marriages, have learnt the art of grudging attendance and quick sophisticated exits.

The social fabric of scores of villages has crumbled. There is competition, bitterness and jealousy. And diabetes. Of course, there is also the mirth of money and a new spirit of enterprise. And some desperate measures to understand wealth.

Recently, five Jats walked into a school and asked the teachers, very politely, if there was a smart girl of marriageable age among their students.

The men told the baffled teachers that the family had earned three crore rupees from a land sale but they were all illiterate. They had decided one of the brothers should marry an educated girl who would know how to handle the money.

Among the many fortunate farmers, is Chatar Singh, an unexcitable 56-year-old man with keen, hard eyes. His white kurta has stains here and there.

In a conservative estimate, he is worth over 35 crore. He lives with two brothers and together they own five cars. Like many farmers in this area, he has been selling land to purchase more land in the outskirts of Gurgaon.

Now he owns 19 acres worth about Rs 20 crore, according to brokers. "This land around my house is worth 15 crore," he says sitting on a cot and smoking a hookah. His grandchildren go to schools that cost over a lakh a year. "Good schools," he says. "I went to a school where the teachers would come to the class and make sweaters."

Chatar goes to wake up his younger brother, Surinder, who is in bed this afternoon. Surinder is in politics. "I was always interested in it," he says a bit sheepishly.

The youngest brother of Chatar is Satbir Singh who is a stout hairy man with a hectic look about him. He is in a towel that is wrapped around what have to be cycle shorts.

His wife is veiled and is part of the background. His two teenaged sons are lying on a sofa like content pythons.

"Money has changed everything. Man has no real friend left anymore in the village. Everybody is doing his own thing," he says. "Money teaches you new things. Till recently, we didn't know the heart could stop suddenly. Now heart attacks are common."

In old Gurgaon, an area that is also called a "village" in these parts, the glamour of the new developments gives way to overcautious pigs, narrow clogged lanes and the chaos of the mofussil. Old money lives here.

Vijay Jain, who is called seth even by the new millionaires, is a large man with a gentle giant's manners. In him there is this force of rustic intelligence.

His ancestors were village money lenders and generations of farmers have turned to his family for advice. Today, no farmer in the surrounding village sells his land without consulting Jain.

Since the whole trade runs on trust, his role is crucial. He advises farmers on the right price and tells them how to invest in more land in the outer fringes of Gurgaon.

"Apart from land, I think it is a good idea for farmers to invest in making residential blocks with small rooms. There are lakhs of Bihari migrants here already. More will come. They need places to stay on rent. There is money in it," he says.

He used to be a bridge between the builders and the farmers. "I have now retired," he says. People like him are vital to the builders because builders never buy land directly from farmers. There is always a village hand who brokers the deal.

The village hand is also called a "consolidator" because his job is to ensure the procurement of continuous swathes of land. Since land is usually owned jointly by brothers, the broker has to find ways to convince family members with opposing views.

"Some brothers may want to hold on to the land for a better price, some may want to sell," says C Karthik, a real estate consultant.

A farmer need not pay income tax on the earnings from the sale of his land if he uses the money to buy another piece of agricultural land within three years.

Even if this provision did not exist, the bullish farmers of Gurgaon would have invested in land. When 75-year-old Simrat Singh is asked his views on the easy-come-easy-go character of money, he says without blinking, "I have put my easy money in more easy money. I have bought land."

He also bought a car, "a small car" but he does not know it is called Santro.

Resource://indiatimes.com

The Gurgaon
Advertisement
based MDLR Group is all set to begin operations of its regional airline, MDLR Airlines, by the end of this month. Selvel Media Services has been appointed as the AOR for its outdoor duties.

Kaustav M Dhar, president, commercial and strategy, MDLR Airlines, says, “We were evaluating multiple outdoor options before deciding to settle with Selvel. The agency gave us better options, both in terms of quality and pricing.”

MDLR Airlines will start its operation in six cities, Kolkata, Delhi, Ranchi, Chandigarh, Jaipur and Surat, by April end. Tanmay Dasgupta, general manager, sales and marketing, Selvel Media Services, says, “We will handle a variety of outdoor solutions for MDLR and are working on an out-of-the-box medium, especially in cities.”

The creatives for these campaigns have been done in-house by MDLR Airlines.

MDLR Airlines, a short haul airline, is a part of the real estate gurgaon group, MDLR.

Source://agencyfaqs.com

The Congress party's inability to learn from its own past experience defies understanding. Step by inexorable step, it is going down precisely the road it took in 1995, and step by step it is heading for the same dire outcome.

In December 1994, the party lost the state elections in Andhra and Karanataka, and set up two committees to understand why it should have lost in these supposedly safe states. One of them reported that the cause was inflation, which had been high ever since the 1991 foreign exchange crisis and was being pushed up once more by the boom in the economy.

So in May-June 1995, with less than a year left for the next election, the party decided that this had to be brought down at virtually any cost. The belt tightening that began then killed the boom in investment of the previous five years and with that killed industrial growth. From 16 per cent in January-March 1996, it fell to zero in October 2000.

I have been warning readers in these columns that an exclusive reliance upon monetary policy to contain the boom that has set in will have exactly the same effect. (See: Monetary stability at what cost?) and also (See: Boom or recession: who decides?)

But my warnings have fallen on deaf ears. For politics has stepped in once again. After the Congress party's electoral defeats in Uttarakhand, Punjab and Manipur, the Congress has begun to look for explanations with the same frantic stupidity that it displayed in 1995.

Mrs. Sonia Gandhi has pronounced that the culprit is inflation once again. As a result killing inflation has been abruptly moved to the top of the agenda, and the burden has fallen once again entirely on monetary policy.

What no one has explained to Mrs. Gandhi is precisely how using monetary policy to kill inflation will end by killing growth. When it does that, the Congress will lose its sole selling point with the public so far, that in the past three years very high growth has made sure that no one who comes into the job market is denied employment.

If the recession that I now foresee develops — it will take between ten months to 14 months to fully reveal itself — by the time the Congress goes to the next election it will have next to nothing to show for its five years in office at least nothing that the ordinary people understand or care about.

Unfortunately we are so far down this road that it may be next to impossible to turn back.

Mr Y V Reddy, the governor of the Reserve Bank has been fighting a battle against the finance minister to give inflation precedence over growth for the last eight months. On Friday last week, he succeeded. After Mrs. Gandhi's pronouncement, the finance ministry caved in. So, instead of taking a close look at the most recent price and investment trends in the economy, Mr Reddy has pushed up the cash reserve ratio — the proportion of their deposits that banks have to hold in cash, by a full half per cent. (See: RBI steps up fight on inflation with Repo, CRR hikes) This is the third successive increase in the CRR in the past few months. Together they have sucked Rs43,000 crore out of the base of the financial system. The result has been predictable. Even before last Friday's increase three- to five-year deposit rates had crossed the ten per cent mark - 4.5 per cent higher than they were just six months ago.

Resource:www.domain-b.com