Coimbatore – An Emerging Real Estate Destination
When property prices across the country shot up sharply, several tier II and tier III cities clocked a higher rate of growth than even the metros. Once the market sentiments turned negative, the downward spiral in prices were faster in these second and third-rung cities, as investors dropped them from their portfolio.While the market has more or less stopped even thinking about these cities, Jones Lang LaSalle Meghraj (JLLM), a global property advisory company, has identified Coimbatore as an exception and has called it a city that offers a lot of potential for growth in the future. The company has recently brought out a white paper, ‘Coimbatore – An Emerging Real Estate Destination,’ which traces the evolution of the city’s real estate market, identifies its numerous market drivers and showcases its prospects as the perfect south Indian real estate investment destination.“It is time to sit up and take notice of Coimbatore’s status as a highly-promising, alternative IT/ITeS and biotech destination,” Ramesh Nair, managing director, Chennai and Hyderabad, JLLM, said. “This city has everything, including telecom, power, a highly-skilled workforce, a rapid pace of infrastructure development and a proactive government that is aggressively promoting the city,” he said.
The study mentions Coimbatore’s high literacy rate, the pace at which top multinationals are migrating to the city and the manner in which the retail, hospitality, entertainment and residential sectors are growing as promising. The study confidently concludes that Coimbatore, the second fastest growing city in Tamil Nadu after Chennai, is indeed a boom story.“Our findings in this study indicate that Coimbatore will emerge as a favoured destination for real estate investment in the long run,” said Abhishek Kiran Gupta, head of research, JLLM. “There is a huge potential for local, national as well as international developers in the real estate sector in Coimbatore. We are of the opinion that there is no better time than now for developers, investors, tenants and homeowners to strategise and collaborate to reap the long-term benefits of right investments in the right place,” he said.
Coimbatore, which has a high literacy rate, looks all set to scale new heights as a preferred destination for corporate firms to expand their business presence. Over the next four-five years, Coimbatore is likely to add close to 100,000 jobs, which will in turn contribute to the growth in the per capita income of the city, the white paper said.
The report says the global meltdown, which has exerted severe macro-economic pressure on the industry, has not left Coimbatore untouched. However, the city’s entrepreneurial spirit, combined with all its unique advantages, when compared with other neighbouring tier III cities, would act as growth drivers. While the effects of the economic crisis are only a short-term challenge for all stakeholders of the real estate industry, Coimbatore is likely to emerge as a hot destination for real estate investments in the long run, the paper concluded.
