Excellent News This Quarter for Commercial Property in Bangalore

There was a slightly greater increase in demand for commercial New projects in Bangalore this quarter over the same quarter last year. This occurred in spite of the fact there was not an increase in demand for property from large multinationals in Bangalore. Much of the increase in demand for commercial property in Bangalore took place in Whitefield, which is the IT hub of Bangalore. The absorption for real estate increased to 2.7 million square feet from the 2.3 million square recorded in the same quarter last year.  During the first quarter of last year, the gross absorption of commercial space stood also stood at 2.3 million square feet. The properties under development which will be delivered within the next 4 to 6 quarters and net absorption of property together make up gross absorption. The moderate increase in the demand for commercial property may also lead to a moderate increase in the demand for commercial projects in Bangalore, particularly in regions close to Whitefield. 

Whitefield the IT Hub in Bangalore

The region of Whitefield witnessed the greatest increase in the demand for commercial office space this previous quarter. Whitefield had more vacancies for office space when compared to the Outer Ring Road. This is not necessarily good news for Whitefield as the reason for more demand for commercial space in Whitefield had to do more with available space at the Outer Ring Road which has a vacancy of only 2 percent due to its far smoother connectivity with regions which have more real estate in Bangalore.  

Companies Which Acquired the Most Commercial Space

According to experts, commercial property in Bangalore continues to remain constraint however there is a large supply of space in regions such as Whitefield and Electronic City. TCS acquired the largest amount of commercial space during the previous quarter in Whitefield, an area measuring .55 million square feet. The second largest acquirer of space was Broad Ridge Financial which acquired close to .15 million square feet of commercial space. Home improvement company Lowe’s acquired .12 million square feet of commercial space in Embassy Tech Park. An increase in the demand for commercial space is usually a good sign for the creation of new affordable and luxury flats in Bangalore.

What to Expect in the Future

Experts believe that though the news was positive was commercial property in Bangalore it is unlikely to match the growth in the previous two years. In 2014 and 2015 the demand for commercial property in Bangalore stood at 11.3 and 12.2 million square feet largely due to the fact that companies such as Flipkart, Ola, and Amazon made huge commitments to their businesses.

Unlike the glamor of the previous quarter which saw the likes of Apple and Diageo acquire commercial property in Bangalore, this year the only glamorous company to acquire commercial space has been Lowe’s. The Outer Ring Road continues to be the prime locality for commercial real estate in Bangalore due to its close proximity to apartments in Bangalore from where employees can commute smoothly to and from their office. Overall there has been a drop of .2 million square feet in commercial space acquired this year over the same time the previous year.

Chinese Speech Recognition Edge Impacts Future of Apartments in Bangalore

Emerging speech recognition technologies may be pertinent to those who own apartments in Bangalore and work in the cities thriving IT sector. Swiftly advancing technologies capable of tasks which ten years ago were impossible to be automated are emerging from companies which are capitalizing on colossal data that has been gathered for over a decade. A new technology from the Chinese search engine giant Baidu will now make it possible for people to text message with greater speed and accuracy than ever before using only speech. Speech recognition software was available nearly twenty years ago yet failed to attract a large number of users as it was not very reliable at that time. Today technologies are developing so rapidly that Baidu in collaboration with two American universities has used its massive search engine database to create language recognition software that is more accurate and faster than some of the fastest humans who type.

Clearly, technology is rapidly evolving and as more people time online punching in queries on search engines, newer ways to map human thought shall emerge. Features such as Google Instant search would likely never have emerged before they did nearly six years had Google not already had an idea of the kinds of keywords people use to search. Now the Chinese, which had banned Google more than a decade ago, have a huge corpus of data also gleaned from the thought patterns of living humans which allow them to digitalize the spoken word into a written format faster than was possible earlier. To be fair, Baidu has an advantage recognizing words as spoken and written Chinese are virtually identical. Yet the thoughts behind the written and spoken and words are similar across languages and hence the fact that a newer speech recognition language emerges by the efforts of the Chinese search engine giant is unsurprising. CEO’s who live in luxury apartments in Bangalore should take note of a large number of newer formidable technologies emerging from China while IT workers in Bangalore continue to carry out relatively routine and mundane tasks. Bangalore may lose its edge as a center of IT to China if efforts are not made to develop innovative technologies which can rival or surpass those emerging elsewhere across the globe.

Millions of search queries are typed into a single search engine each day, the data gleaned from such search results is gold to IT companies even as it generates revenue for the search engine. Top builders in Bangalore today rely on Google for much of their advertising; a high page rank by Google is prized by many builders and developers in Bangalore. Yet despite the fact that the CEO of Google is of Indian origin most of the benefits which accrue from Indian search queries go into American hands. Baidu is a credible threat to Google’s worldwide dominance. The ability to use language to map human thoughts will likely be crucial to developing newer technologies and may even be at the core of developing strong Artificial Intelligence.

A viable domestic search engine is crucial, even if such an engine is developed and promoted by the public sector. Upcoming projects in Bangalore, advertised on the big three search engines such as Google, Bing, and Yahoo, will be better served by a powerful domestic search engine whose page ranking mechanism better takes into account Indian businesses and the Indian mentality. Advertising from technologies for industries such as real estate which includes luxury and affordable property in Bangalore should be in domestic hands. Western publications such as the New York Times prognosticated dire times ahead for China’s economy when the Chinese government banned Google in China, however, today, China’s local search engine is the model IT company which has mountains of useful data it can use to benefit Chinese business and to develop next generation technologies.