After the gates · Stewardship
The asset, governed.
Completion ends the construction mandate everywhere except on the owner's risk register. A completed Indian asset holds statutory duties that cannot be delegated, income that is only as real as its paper, and a value that moves with how it is run. Stewardship is the governance of that phase: the layer above the property manager, not another property manager.
01 · The seam
Where value leaks
Everyone leaves at completion except the liability.
The contractor demobilises, the consultants close their files, the financing rolls, and the asset begins the decades that were the entire point. What remains with the owner is everything that cannot be handed down: the statutory certificates that must be signed on the owner's letterhead, the consents that expire on their own clocks, the leases whose enforceability is the income. The facilities contractor executes. The owner remains liable. We hold the difference.
For a foreign owner the seam is wider still, because the exchange-control strategy this practice builds entries around, hold for rent, is precisely the strategy that lives or dies on operating discipline. Holding is not the absence of developing. It is a discipline of its own, and it deserves the same governance the construction phase received.
02 · The two costs
Running and governing
India already prices the governance layer. Separately, in its listed accounts.
Read the cash-flow build of India's listed real estate trusts and the structure is explicit: the cost of running the buildings sits above the operating-income line, and the fee for managing the assets sits below it, as its own item. The market's most scrutinised owners treat running and governing as different purchases, because they are.
The stakes are visible in the same accounts. An Indian grade-A office run to institutional standard converts 82 to 86 paise of every revenue rupee into net operating income. We govern to that number, because at that margin small failures are expensive: a lease that slipped registration, a service-charge year that never reconciled, a consent renewed late. Each one lands directly on the only line a valuer capitalises.
Leased occupancy is what you contracted. Trading occupancy is what you have. We report both.
03 · The statutory calendar
Non-delegable
Compliance in India is federal, not national.
Anyone selling a single pan-India compliance calendar has not read the state rules, so ours are built per state and dated. What follows is the shape of one, drawn from the largest market, to show the discipline rather than to substitute for it.
The owner's clock, illustrated from Maharashtra
- 01Structurethe stability certificate falls due at thirty years, then every ten; the commissioner may call it earlier, and the market routinely mis-states the cycle
- 02Firethe owner's compliance certificate is filed twice each year, on the owner's own responsibility, above daily-to-annual system maintenance
- 03Electricalthe five-year inspection everyone quotes is the floor; above 250 kilowatts of connected load, which every grade-A asset clears, inspection is annual under a designated safety officer
- 04Liftsinspected at least yearly, licensed on renewal cycles
- 05Environmentconsent to operate renews on category cycles, and an expired consent is an unlawful building wearing a lawful tenancy
- 06Certificationthe plaque earned at construction is permanent; the rating that says how the building is run expires in years, and with it the green-financing eligibility
Every line carries an owner, an evidence trail and an expiry date in our register, because a compliance calendar without expiry dates is a list of future surprises.
04 · The quarterly discipline
The report after monthly reporting ends
We report to the listed standard, whether or not you are listed.
India's securities regulator has already defined institutional-grade operating discipline: a prescribed distributable-cash computation, valuations on a fixed cadence, disclosure to a template. A private owner of a single asset can adopt the whole frame, and ours do, because it is the only cash discipline the Indian market already agrees on, and because the buyer who eventually reads your numbers will read them against it.
- Income, verified
The rent roll tied to the lease deeds, not to a management summary, with registration and stamping confirmed on each, because an unregistered lease is not evidence of income. Arrears aged, deposits reconciled, escalations applied on their actual dates.
- Cost, verified
Operating spend against budget, and the service-charge account reconciled annually as the separate economic right it is. Recovery measured against spend, and the gap named, because it is the owner's money by another name.
- Compliance, dated
The statutory calendar's status with expiry dates forward twelve months, exceptions flagged the quarter they arise, never the quarter they mature.
- Value, maintained
Independent valuation on a semi-annual cadence with its input file kept live: the same pack, current at all times, that an exit will one day demand overnight.
05 · Operating procurement
Tendered, not inherited
The operating contract deserves the construction contract's discipline.
Facilities and maintenance contracts are typically inherited: from the developer, from the manager's own group, from whoever was nearest at handover. We tender them the way we tender construction: scope written by the owner's side, performance measured against the contract rather than against habit, and renewal earned on evidence. In data centres the discipline goes further, because efficiency in India is a contract, not a regulation: if the power and water performance the underwriting assumed is not written in and audited, nobody is holding it.
One structural rule sits above the contracts. The parties who lease the asset, run the asset and value the asset are kept separate, and where one firm would hold two of those seats, we say so and we resolve it. Independence does not retire at practical completion.
06 · The exit dividend
Every quarter deposits it
A governed asset is a saleable asset.
Everything the quarterly discipline produces, the verified rent roll, the reconciled service charge, the dated compliance register, the live valuation file, is also the first half of a sale process. An owner who governs from completion holds a data room that is always current, which means exit readiness on the owner's timetable rather than a scramble on a buyer's. The stewardship mandate does not merely protect the income. It manufactures the exit, one quarter at a time.
Enquiries
The practice answers.
128 City Road, London, EC1V 2NX
The development practice is led by Tanishq Chauhan. Correspondence reaches the principal directly.
Tanishq Chauhan on LinkedIn, opens in a new tab
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