New Delhi: Confident about real estate sector doing well as long as there are "right developers, right pricing and right unit size", eminent banker Deepak Parekh has said a number of new growth drivers are also emerging in form of student housing, retirement homes and co-living projects.
He also said foreign investors have also been investing in a big way in good commercial projects, while warehousing is another segment where they are showing keen interest.
"Student housing is a very big growth area and it has taken off well. Many universities, colleges and educational institutions are now in fact selling their own housing to raise money to build more classes, facilities etc," Parekh said.
"The other growth area right now is co-living. People, including foreign investors, have also started talking about rental housing. And many are also building projects for senior citizens, including some being built by people themselves. We are funding some of them actually," the chairman of the country's biggest housing finance company HDFC Ltd said.
Retirement homes are like hostels with all kinds of facilities available for senior citizens, including medical facilities, and places like Delhi-NCR, Bangalore and Mumbai-Pune region have started seeing such projects.
According to a recent study conducted by News Corp and Softbank-backed realty portal PropTiger, the co-living space has emerged as a "real estate goldmine" that remains largely untapped and has potential to become USD 93 billion market annually on rising demand from students and professionals.
"This is evident from the fact that the supply by organised players in co-living is currently limited to over one lakh beds. Assuming they earn ?1.44 lakh (USD 2,021) per annum per bed, organised players in this segment are currently USD 206 million," the study said.
The report further said that the co-living sector has total untapped demand of about 46.3 million beds, out of which 8.9 million is from student housing.
Among the existing players in the segment are RentMyStay, Rentroomi, SimplyGuest and Flathood. Other players such as NestAway, Stanza Living, Zolo, Placio and CoLive have recently entered the sector.
