Market for business parks in Kolkata picked up in last couple of years: Harshavardhan Neotia

The market for business parks in Kolkata has picked up in the last couple of years and real estate major Ambuja Neotia Group has received a good response to its upcoming project in the city.

The group, led by Harshavardhan Neotia, is currently developing a business park, christened as Ecospace Business Towers, which will have a super built-up area of around 4.50 lakh square feet.

Pioneering in the business parks space in Kolkata, the city-based Ambuja Neotia Group had set up Ecospace Business Park, which became operational in 2014. With 20-acre of land area, it is a large format multi-tenanted business park designed to offer work-life balance through nature infused workspaces. The business park has around 20 lakh square feet of super built-up area.

Commercial launches

Apart from big business parks, the group has also launched three commercial buildings– Ecostation, Ecosuite and Ecocentre. All these are operational.

“All these parks are either leased out or sold. The one under construction (Ecospace Business Towers) is fully sold. We have got a good response. Generally, the market has picked up in the last couple of years,” Ambuja Neotia Group Chairman Harshavardhan Neotia told businessline.

On the initial vision behind launching Ecospace Business Park around 10 years ago, Neotia said, “As we had a decent scale, we tried to bring in a lifestyle element to some of the common facilities – like sporting facilities, conferencing facilities and assembling facilities. People usually have long hours at work and may not have time once they go back home to play sports or take care of their businesses. So, at business parks these facilities would be available in the office premises that they can avail.”

According to him, demands for business parks in other major cities like Mumbai and Bengaluru are much higher, but such parks in Kolkata are “much more affordable”.

“With occupation certificate of a greenfield project at Salt Lake Sector V getting delayed, the city saw no new supply in the first quarter (Q1 2024). After robust supply addition in the previous year, the pipeline for the current year is low at around 0.8 msf (million square feet) though it is expected to pick up substantially in 2025 with a number of projects under development,” according to a report on office space in Kolkata by Cushman & Wakefield.

“Headline office vacancy rate edged down by 30 basis points on a quarterly basis, maintaining its downward trajectory witnessed over the past several quarters. Vacancies across Salt Lake Sector V and Rajarhat are likely to decline further in the upcoming quarters given higher occupier preference for projects in these prime IT corridors,” the report added.