What Really Sells Luxury Homes In India..?

What  Really Sells Luxury Houses In India..?

By Mr. Om Ahuja, CEO (Residential Services), JLL India 

Luxury houses in India are often offered with a very confusing set of qualifying parameters. Developers heavily promote specifications and amenities in their marketing collaterals, but fail to mention a far more critical parameter. 

On analyzing the unfolding luxury homes story in India, it becomes evident that addresses and pin codes have played an important role in defining luxury in the traditional sense.

This continues to be relevant even in the current times, with only a few exceptions to the rule in the country’s key cities.

Despite the multiple innovations, design upgradation and enhanced specifications and amenities visible in the latest crop of luxury offerings, the premium placed on signature locations still stands high. 

One of the most important reasons for this is that the country’s most hard-boiled luxury home buyers are extremely focused on the occupant profile of the projects they consider. 

Om Ahuja,
 JLL India

What Is Occupant Profile..?

Over and above every other consideration, the occupant profile of a luxury project is the most definitive and decisive factor for property buyers in this category. Briefly, it is the profile or the people that reside in the project.

One of the definitions of luxury is ‘a cut above the rest’, and this means that a luxury home buyer expects to live among people of a certain grade of professional accomplishment, prominence and social standing. It is, in fact, the desire to be part of a select peer group. 

This is the social environment in which luxury home buyer wish to inhabit - the the kind of neighbors that they want to have and socialize with, and whose children they want their own children to befriend and grow up with. In short, the term ‘luxury’ denotes a very definite degree of social refinement and class to them.

While it is not necessary for a luxury project to have the city’s most distinguished personalities residing there, buyers still aspire to live among like-minded people from within their own social bracket and intellectual bandwidth.   

The occupant profile value factor, though subjective by nature, can obviously not be replaced or compensated for by glitzy amenities and specifications.

In fact, its presence is more the result of elimination than of creation, and can only result from either or / a combination of two functions: 

1.     A very selective tailoring of the occupant profile by the developer

2.     Location and pricing attributes that exclude all but the desired profile of occupants     

Discerning luxury home buyers will avoid purchasing units in a project which has attracted an excessively mixed profile of occupants.

While lifestyle aspects such as superior amenities and specifications are definitely desirable and dovetail with the overall experience, they are not the most important criterion for the success of a luxury project.

These are the dynamics that have crafted India’s traditional luxury locations – areas that are defined by their residents, rather than their buildings. 

Many projects on the market today have failed to excite the buyers towards whom they were originally targeted because they do not project the right kind of occupant profile. On the other hand, luxury homes projects that have, by intent or because of the right attributes, attracted the right profile of residents, tend to succeed even if they does not have the benefit of glamorous specifications and amenities, flashy brochures and staggering marketing budgets. The investment value of a luxury home is also primarily driven by this variable. 

While resident profile is a key factor defining luxury at our cities’ most recognizable addresses, this does not mean that luxury projects do not succeed at all.

The presence of superior amenities and specification in new luxury locations beyond the traditional luxury precincts have been successfully marketed to buyers who are seeking to upgrade for their existing mid-range homes to ones that offer them a better lifestyle. 

Indian developers have not been fazed by the challenge that the deeper socio-economic connotations of what constitutes luxury poses to their new offerings, and have come out with concepts to seek to defy the ‘premium location’ logic.

The success with which their efforts have been greeted varies, depending largely on how imaginatively they have been able to bring out the concept of modern luxury homes in new locations. 

It stands to reason that the country’s most prominent residential locations cannot yield many more options for those who look for the highest status value in their homes.

However, these buyers will continue to seek specific social environments that developers will have to provide in every new location and project. 

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