The company holds 350 acres of land in its portfolio, and is adopting a strategy of selling land parcels outright rather than develop them

Emerald Acres Pvt Ltd, a land bank company owned by Madhur Bajaj, vice-chairman of Bajaj Auto, is planning to enter the market in the next four months and sell the land that it owns.

Currently, the company holds 350 acres of land in its portfolio and plans to add more land after selling its current holdings. Emerald Acres has no connection with the Bajaj Group. The company has hired Cushman & Wakefield and RBSA, a land-valuation firm. Both entities are evaluating the properties and will disclose the prices shortly. 

"We will come into the market in the next three-four months. We took time to enter the market because we were making sure that all the required permissions are in place before we sell the land. Developers can start work right from day one," said Madhur Bajaj, chairman, Emerald Acres.

Initially, the company is planning to sell a 70-acre plot at Murbad near Thane in the next four months. It owns land in the stretch along the Mumbai-Pune Highway and its largest holding-122 acres-is located at Lonavala, a hill station near Pune.

But the company has no plans to venture into real-estate development and would rather sell parcels of land outright to developers.

Its Pune holding can be used to build an entire township as it is more than 100 acres. It has to be seen at what price the company sells the land parcels. Recently, Mumbai witnessed an over-priced land deal at the Wadala Truck Terminal (WTT) located in central Mumbai. The Lodha Group won the bid at Rs5,723 crore while MMRDA had set a reserve price of Rs50,000 per sq metre and was seeking a minimum price of Rs1,980 crore for the property.

Many developers have made their money buying land cheap, holding on to it for a few years and building and selling homes on these properties subsequently, after prices have tripled or quadrupled. Currently, developers are cautious over buying land as sales have slowed down in the industry.

However, developers have slowly started buying land after last year's slowdown in the industry. During the slowdown in 2008, DLF, Unitech Ltd and Omaxe Ltd had decided to follow a conservative land bank model, after having spent vast sums of money in the previous two years and bidding for parcels of land that have fetched record prices at land auctions.

 — Pallabika Ganguly