Ashiana Housing to invest Rs 1,000 crore in FY27: MD Vishal Gupta

Realty firm Ashiana Housing will invest Rs 1,000 crore this fiscal to buy land parcels for the development of housing projects as part of its expansion plan, a top company official said.

Listed entity Ashiana Housing is one of the leading real estate developers in the country. It specialises in building homes for elderly people.

In an interview with PTI, Ashiana Housing MD Vishal Gupta said housing demand continues to be strong despite global uncertainties.

To tap this demand, he said the company is expanding business across major markets including Delhi-NCR, Rajasthan, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu.

On land acquisition, Gupta said the company is continuously looking for land to develop regular group housing and also senior living projects.

“We will be investing around Rs 1,000 crore this fiscal on land acquisition,” he said, adding that the company has enough cash to fund the investment.

The land acquisition would be outright as well as joint development with landowners.

On sales bookings for the 2026-2027 fiscal, Gupta said it should be more or less the same as the last fiscal that saw pre-sales of over Rs 2,400 crore.

In the first quarter of the current fiscal, Ashiana Housing achieved sales bookings of Rs 358 crore as against Rs 431 crore in the year-ago period.

During the April-June quarter, the company acquired 28.55 acres of land on an outright purchase basis in Pune.

This was the largest ever land deal by the company for development of a senior living project. The upcoming project will have a saleable area of 20 lakhs sq ft and a revenue potential of Rs 1,800 crore.

Gupta noted that the senior living segment has great business potential with an ageing population.

Recently addressing a CII event, Gupta, who is also head of CREDAI-NCR, emphasised the need to develop affordable housing projects.

Ease of doing business, rationalisation of taxes and availability of cheaper land as well as capital would help in enhancing supply of affordable homes, he felt.

“The most important thing that has happened to the real estate market in the last 7-8 years has been RERA, and that has brought a significant amount of transparency and trust back into the system. But we also now need to layer it with ease of doing business, thereby reducing the inefficiencies of delay,” he had said.

The Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016, known as RERA, was enacted by Parliament to regulate the contractual relationship between homebuyers and promoters. It aims to ensure transparency and accountability in the sector, thereby protecting the interests of homebuyers.

Gupta pointed out that the industry faces significant delays in getting building plan approvals as well as registration certificates from state real estate regulatory authorities.

“There is a delay in building plan approvals. There is a delay in RERA. There are delays in compliance, which is affecting our affordability. The second area is rationalisation of taxes. We do not have input credits on GST in real estate. It is affecting affordability significantly,” he added.

Talking about the need for skilled manpower, Gupta said that there is a dearth of good-quality contractors and workers.

He said the workforce is getting more expensive because of the lack of skilled labourers, which in turn leads to an increase in the cost of construction.

“So, we need to figure out how to make our cost more effective,” Gupta said.

He stressed the need to enhance the supply of land parcels for development activities.

Gupta said the quantum of land being used for plotted development in this country is “crazy” and felt that it is a waste of land resources.

“I think the last and a very, very important part of creating affordability is creating cheap capital. And capital will fly to those places where there is not just opportunity, but there is also certainty. So we need to create more predictable environments where laws are far more predictable. Ease of doing business is far higher. That’s how more and more capital will fly into this business,” he said.

Gupta said the industry needs capital at lower cost for creating more supply, which will lead to more affordability.