The Pune Township Mania
The demand trend of Pune residential property is slowly but surely changing to township properties. A growing segment of Pune property buyers now says that nothing less than the autonomy, independence and convenience of a township property will do.
Who are these people? Mostly employees from Pune’s booming IT and manufacturing sectors. The highest demand is from home buyers employed in Hinjewadi, Kalyani Nagar, Viman Nagar, Hadapsar and the PCMC MIDC belt. These home buyers are fed up with the congestion or the inner city and are seeking homes in the new and established township projects that are taking Pune real estate by storm.
What is it about these Pune townships that make them so different from other property options available on the market? Many of these township projects are located in the Pimpri Chinchwad Municipal Corporation in locations such as Ravet, Moshi and Punavale. Existing residents affirm that nothing within the main city can match the bliss of living in these magically located projects.
Nature is, indeed, still master of the situation in these areas. Real estate development in the PCMC area is tightly regulated. There is abundant green cover and almost all of these projects offer unobstructed view of distant hills, while traffic is just a dim, far-off echo from the Express Highway. The environment is absolutely perfect for residential family units. Naturally, prominent developers have snapped up prime land exclusively for the building of township projects in the PCMC.
Other factors have added to the popularity of these locations. The Express Highway, of course, is a vital one. It is the umbilical cord between Pune and other major metropolises, beginning with Mumbai, and is the very lifeblood of Pune’s commercial progress. In addition, the Mumbai-Bangalore Highway (in the close neighborhood) brings in further commercial growth and intercity connectivity.
With the kind of exposure that localities lying along these two major highways get, their popularity comes as no surprise. However, it should also be remembered that it was the Expressway which brought about the existence of the Hinjewadi Infotech and Biotech Park – which is the very important economic driver for Pune City today. Professionals from the city’s IT and manufacturing sectors need homes close to their offices, and also relative privacy in their time away from work. This has been a heavy driving factor behind the demand for township properties in the Pimpri Chinchwad Municipal Corporation.
In the not-so-distant past, township properties were a residential genre reserved exclusively for the rich. This has changes drastically with their rising popularity. The fact is, owning a township property in the PCMC has now become a feasible option for the city’s middle class. High competitiveness among housing finance institutions has ensured that loans for the purchase of homes in these township properties are easily available to the middle class.
All of the above reasons have combined to make township properties the No. 1 choice for Pune property buyers, and therefore a priority for many developers. Recognizing the wave of the future, prominent builders in the PCMC have appropriated land in these high-demand localities and are developing incredibly modern township projects there. These multi-acre township projects offer within their boundary walls every convenience of modern living to the property buyers. In fact, they can justifiably be seen as lifestyle resorts in which one can actually buy units.
The inherent commercial potential of this Pune township property boom cannot be ignored. Obviously, it presents a great opportunity to builders as well as real estate investors. In fact, a huge number of outstation investors – most notably from Mumbai – have already taken note of the Pune township trend. If Bangalore has earned the label of Silicon Valley of the East, Pune is well on the way of being called India’s Township City.
Anil Pharande is Vice President of CREDAI Pune Metro and Chairman of Pharande Spaces, a leading construction and development firm that develops township properties in the PCMC area of Pune, India.
