Real Estate’s Young Turks Of 2021

Realty+ 40 Under 40 inaugural edition this year listed the top real estate professionals for the year 2021 that are paving the path for change and innovation in the sector. From a 10,000 sq. ft area coworking space provider to India's largest managed office space provider is a testimony to Neetish phenomenal growth. Under his leadership, Smartworks has emerged as India's second largest managed office space provider capturing 14% of the market share and with 90% enterprise clients. “Our focus on enterprise clients, profitability and early starter advantage with aggressive growth plans helped us become a leading managed service provider. In the last few years, we have been able to scale up pretty fast because of the sheer size of our property offerings, geographical diversity, and above-average occupancy. We plan to achieve close to 20% market share by the end of this year. Since our inception, our revenues have been growing 3x," explained Neetish. After becoming profitable in less than three years of operations, in the last quarter of 2019, Neetish raised Series A funding for the US $25 million from Keppel Land, Singapore. Amidst the pandemic, the company added about 4.5 Lakh sq. ft spaces in Hyderabad and Mumbai last year. “Over the next five years, we are eyeing a footprint to 20 million sq ft and provide office solutions for over 200,000 working professionals in India. We are also creating a commercial realty platform with expansion into prop-tech, blue-collar tech, facility management service and much more,” said Neetish. We pivoted from a B2C to a B2B model since the market had over 300 players, and all were going after start-ups and freelancers. After much research, we realized that the potential lay with the Enterprises and that segment was untouched then. Apart from cost benefits, we offered value-added services that were missing from the conventional offices. Our strategy of transforming our Co-working spaces into fully managed flex spaces helped on board enterprise clients.