Real estate’s three measures of success

Akshara· Host0:00

[upbeat music] In today's episode, we'll break down two important stories. First, we'll talk about Q4 at India's residential developers, and then we'll talk about Jio and Vodafone not liking Airtel's new post-paid plan. Welcome back to the Daily Brief by Zerodha, where we cut through the noise to help you understand what's actually happening in the most important stories from business and markets. I am your host Akshara, and today is Friday, 29th May. Coming to the first story. On April 27th, Abhishek Lodha, the MD and CEO of Lodha Developers, told investors to stop looking at his company's pre-sales numbers. That was odd. Pre-sales, which is the value of homes a developer agrees to sell in a period, is a number real estate companies live and die by. Lodha had just reported its strongest ever quarter on this front, having sold rupees 5,890 crore worth of homes between January and March, and yet Abhishek wanted investors to focus on his company's actual profit instead. Pre-sales, he said, isn't a great measure of the underlying health of a real estate business. A week later though, on Godrej Properties investor call, chairman Pirojsha Godrej invited investors to focus on, well, pre-sales. Godrej had just announced the largest annual booking value ever published by a listed Indian developer, having sold approximately rupees 34,171 crore worth of homes through the year. Then, a few weeks hence, Prestige Estates' Irfan Razak told investors to look