Real Estate Sector To Grow [Apr 2012]

According to Ashok Chhajer, CMD at Arihant Superstructures shortage of dwellings and increased purchasing power to boost the real estate demandCould you brief us about the present status on real estate sector in India and activities at Arihant Superstructures?As per 11th Five Year Plan (2007-12) there is a shortage of 26.53 million houses in India which provides big investment opportunity for the industry. Also with the rise in the purchasing power within the middle and lower income group, which forms major proportion of our population, the demand is going to remain robust.
Arihant Superstructures is one of the largest developers in Navi Mumbai. Do you have any plans to expand beyond Navi Mumbai?We already have our presence outside Navi Mumbai region. We are planning couple of big launches in March 2012. The total area to start development will be over 9 million sq. ft. within next 2-3 quarters.
Very soon we will also complete our first year in Jodhpur where we had launched our project Arihant Adita of 826 units and Arihant Agrima of 1350 houses. This is the first PPP project of Government of Rajasthan under affordable housing policy 2009 for which we received the “Best Developer Award” in North region.
How did Arihant perform during 2011 and what are your expectations in 2012?We consider 2011 as a lucrative year; as we started the year with our grand expansion pan India level in Jodhpur Rajasthan, for which we got tremendous response. Later in September, we launched two more medium size projects in Maharashtra namely Arihant Amodini at Taloja near Kharghar and Arihant Akriti at Badlapur West.
From the capital market point of view, the company’s revenues have increased from Rs.1274 lacs in FY 2010 to  Rs.10157 lacs in FY 2011, an increase by 697 per cent. Similarly PAT of the company increased from  Rs.131 lacs in FY 2010 to  Rs.736 lacs in FY 2011, an increase by 462 per cent. 
What is your take on the existing land acquisition policy and the need of reform? How much effective the draft land acquisition bill is?There are both positive and negative sides of the policy; hardships stringent must be relaxed for the practical implementation of the policy.
It is learnt that you are going to approach the capital markets with a rights issue. Could you discuss the same in detail?We are coming up with rights issues for amount of `18 crore to partly fund for our PPP project Arihant Agrima with government of Rajasthan at Jodhpur.
Is it going to make any impact over your existing business structure?It will increase the strength and network of the company.
Increasing labour costs is one of the major concerns for the real estate sector. Do you have strategies to cope up with this? The labour requirement needs to be reduced to the maximum extent possible as there is huge shortage of skilled and unskilled manpower today. This will reduce cost, reduce dependency and will give correct & maximum utilisation of human resources available. We are using sundeck system of shuttering technologies by TABLA company from Canada. This technology reduces the carpentry job of making the support system i.e. slabs. These are on the method of tonge and groove replacing hammer and nailing. With such technologies we can achieve better and good finished. By and large technologies and machines are the need of the hour.

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