Ever since he took over as MD and CEO of Godrej Properties in April, 31-year-old Pirojsha Godrej is a man with a mission. Riding on an aggressive launch, combined with its core strategy of entering into joint ventures for land sourcing, the company is gearing up for its next phase of growth. This, despite the challenging times in the realty business. In an exclusive interview to Business Line , the soft-spoken scion of the Godrej family shared his vision for the road ahead.

Excerpts from the interview:

Five months after taking over the driver’s seat, what journey do you envisage for Godrej Properties?

Our focus has been to add more projects. In the last 16 months, we have added 14 new projects to our portfolio which is credible. But now, I would like to see us get even better at things like design.

While there are a lot of short-term challenges that developers are dealing with, the big medium- to long-term opportunity is to distinguish oneself through quality of product and design. We want to focus on expediting that now to a point where it becomes clear in the customer’s mind that Godrej Properties stands for a differentiated set of values beyond the trust parameter that comes with the advantage of the Godrej brand.

What is going to be your contribution to Godrej Properties in terms of strategy?

I am not looking to bring an about turn in the company’s strategy as we have a good model focussed on capital, efficient land sourcing and joint ventures. But we are constantly looking for opportunities to extend this strategy whenever possible. For instance, our recent fund-raising exercise in partnership with APG, where we decided to commit Rs 770 crore of capital to buying land, wasn’t a typical joint venture, but was in line with our core strategy of not leveraging our balance sheet to buy land.

Will you continue to focus mainly on redevelopment and residential projects going forward?

Yes, on the business development side, we have realised that we have a huge opportunity with the Godrej brand to access more and more land parcels and bring them into our portfolio. We have been quite successful with that. As the joint venture model works great with us, we will continue with it.

But we are also looking to extend the same platform, given the opportunities available to us. The platform with APG was one such example and the development management team model that we are using with our own group company for our Vikhroli land and our projects in Byculla and Bangalore is another example.

Redevelopment is another such extension as there we don’t have to buy land.

All these extensions have the same underlying strategy — that we don’t want to buy land and lock up capital at the land purchase stage, but adopt different tactical methods to achieve the same goal.

manisha.jha@thehindu.co.in

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