Eat your hearts out, townies. Navi Mumbai, the satellite city often dubbed the back of beyond, is no longer the place where one could invest cheaply in real estate. The price of realty has gone up as high as the high-rises mushrooming there.
The latest string of premium luxury homes is going for Rs20 crore, which is on a par with — or even costlier than — some of the most expensive addresses in Mumbai.
Take, for instance, flats in the 27-storeyed El Castillo being developed by the Akshar Group. “Our project at Nerul off the arterial Palm Beach Road has four- and six-bedroom apartments for families from the high income group. The cost of the flats range from Rs16 crore to Rs20 crore, including taxes, stamp duty and registration charges,” explains Bharat Patel from the Akshar Group.
Each apartment there, measuring more than 9,000sqft, will set you back by Rs20,000/sqft.
He says the city’s rapid development gave the developers the idea to construct apartments for the “elite”.
Patel says Navi Mumbai’s USP lies in the City and Industrial Development
Corporation (Cidco), the planning agency, making good on its promises. “When it said there would be a garden on a particular plot, it saw to it that only a garden came up there, unlike the case in Mumbai, where many plots reserved for some community halls or educational institutions have been converted into residential complexes.”
“Besides, the availability of big industrial zones along the Thane-Belapur road and the Dhirubhai Ambani Knowledge City has helped boost the city’s realty market tremendously,” he adds.
The high cost of the premium apartments hasn’t deterred buyers. Patel claims that almost all of the flats in the building have been bought by several corporate bigwigs, whose names he refuses to divulge.
There are three more such projects in the pipeline whose apartments have been sold for well over Rs10 crore. “The Regency, also at Nerul, off the Palm Beach Road, and two other projects by Maithili Properties and National Builders have placed themselves in the category of high-end apartments with state-of-the-art amenities. And, the important thing is that developers have also succeeded in selling these to the elite class. From big corporate honchos and industrialists to Bollywood celebrities such as Naseeruddin Shah and Shyam Benegal, have all bought these apartments as either an investment or a place of residence,” says Devang Trivedi, another developer and secretary of the Builders Association of Navi Mumbai (BANM).
This, he adds, proves that the satellite city is the next best destination for owning a second home.
“Earlier, the people used to look at Navi Mumbai from the point of view of status. But now, the situation has changed completely only because of the connectivity it offers to every part of the state. And once the international airport starts operating, then it will offer global connectivity too,” says Trivedi.
He claims that quality combined with affordability is the selling point of Navi Mumbai’s realty.
MC Sunny, managing director of National Builders and president of BANM, agrees. He says although his premium project at Sanpada is in the works, he has got many enquiries about it. “This shows that the satellite city has really created a niche for itself in the state’s real estate sector. If this is the situation now, then imagine what it will be like when the first flight takes off from the international airport by 2017, as promised by the Cidco authorities.”
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