“We want to inspire sustainable and healthy living”

Realty Plus talks to Pritam Chivukula, co-founder and Director of Tridhaatu Realty & Infra Pvt. Ltd., a premium consumer centric real estate company, focused on creating neighbourhoods that are sustainable and inspire healthy living. Pritam has over two decades of experience in the corporate world having previously worked with Kotak Mahindra, Standard Chartered Bank, Colliers International and Brahma Capital; a USD 500 million Private Equity Fund. At Tridhaatu, Pritam leads the team in corporate strategic planning and overall execution but his main focus continues to be on the growth strategies of the Company. The Tridhaatu way Tridhaatu started in the year 2003, when three friends from Podar College, with different areas of specialization got united by one common dream. The dream to create a distinctive real estate company which would be professionally managed, reliable, and set standards never-before experienced in the industry. We each had our own careers going, however, we wanted to do something that introduced a certain freshness in the business. We wanted to come up with a new way of doing real estate in terms of transparency, timely delivery, quality and most importantly post sale service. The service we provide after the delivery of the project is very important for us. We believe that even if one buys a small mobile or vehicle they get some kind of after sales service and hence the same should be present in real estate. In real estate once the customer is given the keys of their house they are then alone in the journey ahead. They are left to figure out their own way forward. However, we believe the developer should be a part of the future and hence we started this company, keeping in mind the essence and importance of building positive consumer relations and providing valuable after sales service. When we entered the market most of our peers then used to outsource majority of their work and thereby productivity of in house processes was zilch. The entire architects and liaison business in terms of approvals was outsourced to consultants, only sales and marketing was insourced. In fact even marketing was done by agencies. Our aim at that point in time was to insource everything. In this industry, projects in the past got stuck and thereby the developer incurred fixed costs for their selves. However, those that employed consultants didn’t incur such costs as they were paid by the sqft. However, the end customer was never the focus of the business. There was so much of demand and such little supply in 2003 that we never needed to market ourselves. When we launched a product it was immediately sold. This resulted in not up to the mark customer service from our end. We soon realized that this was not the best way forward and that our consumers were not happy. So, In Mumbai we set up this company in a few suburbs. We only want to focus on a few suburbs and own those suburbs and thereby co-op that area. For example, in Chembur we ensure we maintain gardens, cleanliness on roads we also organize social initiatives for the locals and maintain all other necessary social medians. We wholeheartedly engage ourselves into the community we operate. We do this on a much larger scale than any other real estate business. We are close to our customers and hence most of our sales comes from reference. We are now close to 30 odd projects out of which we have completed 10 projects and 20 are under construction. We have spread out to Mahim, Matunga, Ghatkopar, Mulund and now we are looking for new avenues to enter. We are also building an hospital as well as school in Chembur. Our main focus lies in residential spaces. We do redevelopment of old structures, SAR and we have land banks where we do fresh green field development. We don’t do retail, commercial offices or hospitality. Tridhaatu are currently not in the affordable segment. We are waiting and watching to see how the next 12 months pan out and if everything goes well in terms of stable government and other factors we may look at venturing into affordable housing. We do see a big opportunity for us but we need to take guided steps in the segment. We are professionally driven and are funded by some of the largest institutions such as HDFC, Piramal and ICICI. We have an equity partnership with ASK Group. Most of our partners are institutional partners. When it comes to the rest of the country we have no aims of venturing out of MMR. We want to be a local business as there are plenty of opportunities right here. We will continue to operate for the next 5 years in the MMR region itself. Depending on how the country shapes up we might look at other parts of Maharashtra, maybe few parts of south but nothing that we can confirm for the moment. However, it is often said never say never. So one cannot determine what the future holds for us. Tridhaatu has carved a niche for itself in the premium residential space having developed innovative projects with contemporary architecture, strong project execution and quality construction. That’s been our story so far!