“By the end of this year, we will have 10 million sq ft of office space operational, and another 10 million sq ft under development,” Quek says. When complete, Mapletree’s India AUM will be valued at $5 billion, he adds.
The assets are in two buckets: India Real Estate Investment Platform and on Mapletree Investments’ own balance sheet. In 2023, Mapletree partnered with La Caisse (formerly Ivanhoé Cambridge) to launch India Real Estate Investment Platform, a private fund investing in tech-focused workplaces in India, with an initial investment capacity of $2.5 billion.
The joint venture currently comprises four tech-sector office workspaces with 852,437 sqm (9.2 million sq ft) of net lettable area. They are Global Technology Park in Bengaluru; Global Infocity Park in Chennai; Global Business City in Pune; and Vikhroli Business City in Mumbai.
A further 743,224 sqm (10 million sq ft) is under development in Bengaluru and Pune, which Mapletree Investments carries on its own balance sheet. They are Global Business City, Bengaluru and an office development at Yerawada, Pune.
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“The 10 million sq ft under development will be completed in phases. We have built a nice pipeline and we are not rushing into anything. We have a recurring income base from the joint venture, and part of the joint venture is under development,” Quek adds, referring to Vikhroli Business City in the joint venture with La Caisse.
Quek was formerly overseeing both India and China. But in 2016, his energy was 100% focused on India. “The boss decided. At that time, China was still going strong — India wasn’t.”
Quek spent the first couple of years looking for partners, but subsequently, Mapletree decided to go it alone. “It was a very educational and painful experience in terms of time and tenacity. The approval process when going in with a local partner is vastly different compared to doing it on our own as a foreigner,” he recalls.
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With a local partner, approvals usually take a shorter time. “They may take three months versus the two years we took. We really needed perseverance to sustain. As foreigners, local property consultants would not give us much attention compared to a bigger developer. We had to knock on doors to get tenants. But when people saw the quality of our product, the whole thing changed,” Quek remembers.
“Our first office in India, in Bangalore (Bengaluru), was column-free. We were the first column-free building in all of India. When we had Fortune 500 tenants that came in, a lot of them grew from leasing one floor to ending up with occupying six, seven floors; each floor was 20,000 sq ft,” Quek describes.
Going it alone in India has enabled the Mapletree team in India to go through the entire process of acquiring land, getting approvals for development, development itself, followed by leasing, and subsequently managing the assets.
“My core team was with us right from the beginning and they went through the pain for some of the land we acquired seven years ago. We had to make sure the titles were clear. Most of the land is owned by farmers and families. We buy the land and then amalgamate it,” Quek says.
Often, when a developer acquires land in India, the acquisition can be stopped when one of the owners objects. This makes India very different from China, where the government or the provincial government own the land.
“The difference in China is that it’s centrally controlled. You buy, it’s clean and you move on. India is different. There won’t be 10 malls coming up next to yours. But you can get some people claiming rights to the land. That’s why having a clean title is very important. Being a big country, every city has little nuances in their regulations,” Quek points out.
As he sees it, his competitor “is everybody there”. Mapletree’s column-free buildings come with LEED Platinum certification. “We are future-proofing the buildings. We are very focused on the opportunity at hand and the merits of the micro market. We’ve done our homework as to the demand, usually because of growth in absorption,” Quek indicates.
Mapletree’s Global Business City in Pune, a city in the state of Maharashtra in Western India
Loyal employees
Mapletree is fortunate that the team that started with Quek 15 years ago is still with him. “We are blessed with our people who have been with us for so long and they have got war wounds. The average length of service for the core management team in India is 13–14 years and the turnover rate is less than 5%,” he says, adding that he is the only foreign passport holder in his team. Everyone else based in India is a local.
Quek attributes employee loyalty to the way Mapletree looks after its employees. For instance, during Covid-19, Singapore was among the first nations to experience an outbreak in 2020 and closed its borders. When that happened, many Malaysians were initially stuck in Singapore without a place to stay.
The pandemic hit India in late March 2020. “In our project, I said go and buy mattresses and mosquito nets. After the government shut down India, you saw workers migrate to their home states. Our workers had no problem, because we had a place for them to stay. We looked after them. We treat each other with dignity, so people are working because they feel valued. We have this whole ecosystem where we look after our staff from all aspects,” Quek points out.
During those years, the mother of a Mapletree employee in India caught Covid-19, failed to get a hospital bed and passed away. Since then, Mapletree has adopted a hospital to donate to each year.
Other corporate social responsibility events include tree planting. “We have planted 20,000 trees, and we have only 100 staff. We plant the trees together with our tenants, which is quite credible. We have given scholarships to 2,000 students. We rejuvenated a lake where we increased the capacity by 2.5 times, translating into 14 million litres of water annually,” Quek itemises.
Leasing, capital management
India is the dominant global hub for Global Capability Centres (GCCs) and home to more than 2,000 such centres that employ over 1.9 million professionals. Multinational corporations use GCCs to transition from basic back-office operations to strategic research, development and global innovation hubs.
Mapletree’s commercial space in India is located in IT parks, and the buildings resemble its flagship, Mapletree Business City, in Singapore. “The bulk of our tenants are the GCCs. For the last five years, in the cities that we operate, the growth or the absorption of offices is growing at 25% per annum,” Quek says. “We’ve seen that a lot of Fortune 1,000 companies are setting up offices and growing their GCCs,” he adds. Rents in India for Mapletree’s business spaces average US$1–US$1.50 psf.
Onshore banks have seen Quek and his team work on projects from start to finish, including land acquisition, construction, leasing and management. In addition, both Mapletree’s shareholders and La Caisse are triple-A or double-A rated by rating agencies. Hence, Mapletree has almost no issue securing financing.
As a strategy, Mapletree uses onshore debt. The cost of debt in India is around 7%. Mapletree’s loan-to-value is low in India. Here is why: for land acquisition, companies must pay in cash, as debt cannot be used. Companies can finance construction with debt and the construction loan is amortising.
Since only the construction portion is funded by debt and is amortising, loan-to-values are low, particularly as Mapletree revalues the land upwards upon completion of development. As for the depreciation of the rupee against the Singapore dollar, rental escalations typically offset currency depreciation.
“When you do development, if you buy a piece of land and build, you definitely make more money than if you bought something from the developer, and the margin is substantially higher,” Quek points out. “Your returns will be healthier, your ability to overtake devaluation will be better. It’s harder work, but the returns, along with managing the depreciation and the cash flow, are quite healthy.”
Quek is also studying data centre development in Chennai and Mumbai. “Chennai would be good because that’s where the fibre pipes come into India,” he says.
When asked about exit options, Quek points to the IPO of Bagmane Prime Office REIT, which was 27 times oversubscribed when it listed in India on May 15 and was backed by Blackstone. Interestingly, Blackstone also backed Embassy Office Parks REIT (2019), Mindspace Business Parks REIT (2020), Nexus Select Trust (2023) and Knowledge Realty Trust (2025) — all of which are commercial real estate portfolios.
“Use that as the benchmark. The local market has a lot more depth and a lot of money is supporting the local stock market,” Quek says.
“If someone has a good portfolio with annuity income, I think the reception will be very good,” he concludes — and that could include Mapletree’s India portfolio.
Photos: Mapletree
