Maintaining 8-10% price hike in B'lore: Sobha Developers

In an interview to CNBC-TV18, JC Sharma, Vice-Chairman & MD, Sobha Developers said that this year the company has been able to maintain momentum of 8-10% prices increase in Bangalore.

Below is the verbatim transcript of the interview Q: We have got your latest quarter’s sales performance. It looks like there has been an improvement in sales momentum both quarterly and yearly. Can you take us through the numbers? A: You are right. Preceding quarter we did about 835,000 square feet and primarily it came from Bangalore and Chennai market. This quarter we did about 946,000 sq ft of Rs 530 crore new sales equivalent, which primarily came from Bangalore and NCR. There was a significant improvement in our Thrissur market as well in the preceding quarter. If we compare it with last year, all the markets had done well including Bangalore, by about 30-40,000 sq ft. We had done a very successful launch of Sobha City in the preceding years same quarter. Going forward we do believe that this year we have been able to maintain the momentum with 8-10 percent on an average our price increase and towards doing better than Rs 2000 crore in new sales. Q: What about pricing in the Thrissur market? You have seen higher sales and there pricing exactly is slightly lower than the other markets? So has that led to a slight drop in realizations? What's the outlook going forward in terms of pricing? A: You are right. Due to higher contribution from the Thrissur market there was a small drop down. But if you look at it on a yearly basis we are still up by 10 percent. On balance this year we do believe that 10 percent increase in the overall realization should be there, which is good enough to protect our margins.