Every Independence Day, we measure our country’s progress in the language of economic milestones – GDP, exports, per-capita income, and so on. Real estate rarely makes it to the headlines spotlighting India’s progress, but it is one of the most honest records of it. There are some metrics that tell us the same story from a different vantage point: what we have built, and how we have financed, governed, and occupied it.
From informal to institutional
Three decades ago, India’s organised office market was a fraction of what it is today. It was built gradually and financed largely through individual and promoter capital. Formal institutional financing for real estate was extremely limited. Today, that same market has crossed the landmark threshold of 1 billion sq. ft. of office stock, underpinned by REITs, institutional investors, private credit, and banks. Parallelly, reforms such as RERA and the public listing of real estate companies have collectively made the sector transparent and investable – at scale.
That shift, from a handful of players raising capital informally to a market now attracting record institutional inflows, is arguably the single biggest change in Indian real estate since 1947.
What the first half of 2026 tells us
The data from the first six months of this year shows that India’s core real estate sectors are capable of absorbing global shocks. In fact, they are setting records. The office market leased approximately 45.5 million sq. ft. between January and June (H1) 2026, the strongest half-year on record, with new supply additions at an all-time high for any H1 period. The real estate segment also witnessed roughly USD 8.5 billion in capital inflows during the same period, up nearly a third year-on-year, and the strongest half-yearly performance since 2018.
Notably, domestic capital, not foreign, now drives the overwhelming majority of that investment. Retail leasing held its ground too, growing by a fifth year-on-year even as consumer sentiment softened under inflationary pressure. This is an economy, and a real estate sector, that has learned to navigate shocks rather than be defined by them.
The shape of the new India
In the last few years, the fundamental question in commercial real estate has changed to who is occupying this space, and why. GCCs are becoming decision-making hubs for global enterprises. Alongside this, the asset classes we build have diversified well beyond offices and homes-into data centres, logistics parks, co-living and flexible workspace, warehousing and, increasingly, infrastructure itself, as airports, ports and metro corridors are opened up to private capital and development. India’s real estate story today is no longer one story; it is several, running in parallel.
Infrastructure has been the quiet enabler of all of this. From the commissioning of the Delhi-Ghaziabad-Meerut RRTS and the Mumbai-Nagpur Samruddhi Mahamarg, to the first phase of Navi Mumbai’s new international airport and progress on Vizhinjam’s transshipment port, each of these projects does more than move people and cargo; they open up new geographies for real estate demand, well beyond the six or seven cities that have historically dominated India’s growth map.
The road to 2047
None of this means the work is done. If anything, the milestones we’ve just crossed should sharpen our ambition. The key constraint has moved from financing projects to execution. And that capacity needs to be built deliberately at the municipal level, where projects are actually delivered. Ease of doing business has improved but needs to move to better practice before it can change investment decisions.
As GCCs and technology absorb the country’s best talent, we cannot let manufacturing and skilling enablers-the ITIs and IITs-fall behind. Services alone cannot employ a country as vast and demographically young as India. The RBI’s own projections put India’s GDP growth at 6.7% for FY2027, among the strongest for any large economy, but to translate this into broad-based prosperity, we need to build the cities, the institutions, and the skilled workforce.
Seventy-nine years ago, India began building a nation from very little. Today, the task is different but no less urgent: building the next 500 cities, the next generation of infrastructure, and the execution capacity to match our ambition. If we get that right, 2047 will look back on 2026 the way we look back on 1991-as the year the foundations were still being laid.
(The author is Chairman & CEO – India, South-East Asia, Middle East & Africa, CBRE)
Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author
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