It’s raining homes on Chennai’s Old Mahabalipuram Road or OMR as national realty developers are betting big on Chennai’s IT highway located in the outskirts of the city. Over 10,000 new apartments are coming up in this place in four major residential townships.
There has been investment to the tune of Rs 4,000 crore in this emerging residential hub. Foreign real estate fund Pacifica Group is investing Rs 1,000 crore in a mixed use township that will have 4,500 apartments to offer. The Hiranandani Group is investing Rs 2,000 crore.
Hyderabad-based developer Lanco has also announced investment worth Rs 600 crore in the area while Bangalore-based Purvankara Group is bringing in Rs 200 crore to build 730 apartments.
These companies are counting on the demand for an estimated 4 lakh IT professionals that Chennai’s IT corridor is expected to bring in.
“We think soon it will develop into a full-blown suburb for the city. And what we see in other cities is that people like to walk to work. They don’t want to spend much time traveling. That’s the reason we feel residential flats have huge potential here,” Vikram Agnihotri, Regional Head of Pacifica Group, says.
While the IT influx has been a major attraction, experts of the housing industry say they prefer Chennai to other South Indian cities for development because it does not depend solely on the IT industry.
All this attention has caused land prices in OMR to double within just six months from Rs 15 crore an acre in December last year to nearly Rs 30 crore an acre now.
The first apartment complexes being built here are currently being pre-booked at Rs 4,500 per sq ft and the realty firms which have made huge investments here believe that they will see a 10 to 15 per cent appreciation on this price year on year, making these homes more and more expensive in the days ahead. Source:CNN-IBN
