Five years ago, Bangalore-based property magnate Irfan Razack, who gained prominence by riding the boom in India’s tech capital, decided to venture into Mumbai’s highly competitive property market. It seemed a long shot. Would his Prestige Estates Projects be able to replicate its south India success in the country’s financial hub against entrenched big names—all billionaire-owned—such as Lodha’s Macrotech Developers, Godrej Properties and Oberoi Realty?

Defying skeptics, Prestige has since then made notable inroads in Mumbai and its signature logo of a flying falcon now adorns billboards showcasing a slew of upcoming residential and commercial projects. These extend all the way from tony South Mumbai to an office complex in midtown Mumbai to fast-growing middle-class suburban enclaves further north. It has 11 projects—six of them with partners—covering roughly 32 million square feet, with completion slated in stages, starting in 2025 until 2031.

“We have the market, we have the buyers, we have the brand.”

Razack’s strategy? He saw a rare opportunity to gain a foothold by scooping up distressed projects from cash-strapped developers, while building a strong team with local knowledge and connections. “We have the market, we have the buyers, we have the brand and we have the management that’s capable of delivering the numbers,” says Razack, 70, who is Prestige’s chairman and managing director.

Indeed, the numbers speak for themselves. In the fiscal year ended March 2024, Prestige notched up record sales of 210 billion rupees ($2.6 billion) with Mumbai accounting for 15%, up from nearly 7% two years earlier when annual sales were just under half that at 103 billion rupees. In the current fiscal year, Razack expects a 54% surge in Mumbai sales to 50 billion rupees, even as he’s plotting Prestige’s expansion into other cities beyond its southern stronghold, which includes a sizable presence in Hyderabad.

Prestige sales

The company’s stock has been on a tear, closing at 1,870 rupees in late September, up 58% in 2024 and more than triple its year-ago level. The rising share price boosted the wealth of Razack and his siblings to $6 billion, earning them a spot, after a decade-long hiatus, in the ranks of India’s 100 Richest, a list that features half a dozen other multibillion dollar property fortunes this year.

Prestige’s growth has been fueled in part by India’s red-hot real estate market, which is benefiting from increasing urbanization, an infrastructure buildout and the trend to invest in property. The country’s property sector could potentially increase tenfold to $10 trillion in asset value and that of related services by 2047 from under $1 trillion today, according to a September report by real estate consultancy firm Colliers and the Confederation of Real Estate Developers’ Association of India.

Razack had long harbored the dream of expanding into Mumbai. But it took a confluence of factors to pave the way for his entry. India’s real estate reforms of 2016 ushered in long-demanded transparency and accountability. The opportunity to pick up sites arose when rising funding costs precipitated a liquidity crunch and project delays, compelling distressed developers to undertake a fire sale of their land parcels. The auction of sites entangled in legal disputes and the growing trend of redevelopment, wherein older buildings are torn down and rebuilt, provided other openings,........

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