Mr. AgneloRajesh Athaide – Chairman, St.Angelo’s VNCT Ventures, Mumbai
St. Angelo’s VNCT Ventures is not a brand; it’s a culture. This story is a compelling one and gives deep insight into how engagement from your customer becomes a natural outcome when you drive your values into every little thing that you do as an organization. To understand each fragment of this deeply rooted culture at ST. Angelo’s VNCT Ventures I met Agnelo Rajesh Athaide, This half-hour engaging conversation brought to light a significant element of an empathetic approach that helps create amazing projects not just for decades but for generations to come.
The first and foremost element that we learnt is that you need to hold value for money and then if you successfully create a buying profit to the buyer, only then there is a market. The dynamics of business have changed forever. The Covid-19 situation has changed our process forever. Getting customers is like getting the board. Therefore you need to put it to him. You need to respect him. And the consumer needs to get more in terms of value compared to the money that he/she is paying.
Whether it is computer education or whether it is real estate development, his company has developed a rule for when to deliver or sell, they like to provide in a way in which the buyer is getting much higher than the rally that they are paying. We need to get pragmatic as real estate is the best investment that a human being makes.
The best part about real estate is that basically everyone builds it with a bank loan, but 20 years down the line, the value of the asset that he has bought will make people from 30 to 40 times its initial value. And that’s the most significant gift that you can create for any customer that you have.
When you deliver a brilliant product & you fall back on the bed, at the end of the day, you feel so satisfied. There are two pillars on which the illicit industry stands, or basically, the project’s stance is during the execution of the project. One is the Smooth Project execution and the second is meeting the project deadlines.
Key management ingredients for your team
Mr. Athaide said “Constructing a structure is like giving birth to a child by a woman being a man. I can’t deliver babies. Only a female can deliver a baby, not a man. Realistic gives you that pleasure”.
You’re actually delivering a baby yourself. It is critically important to understand that you need to have the best professionals on board. It is not the quality of the steel, cement and bricks that you use in a structure. Still, it is the quality of the performance you get from professionals, the architects, project management consultants, structural engineers and structural consultants, and so forth.
Fundamentally your planning needs to be critically important. You need to set the agenda for work daily without any interruption so that the promised date is delivered.
Mr. Athaide’s method of real estate development is outsourcing every activity to capable and competent teams, any agencies like a contractor or project management consulting. And then he gets them monitored by specially appointed engineers at the site.
Overcoming the Challenges
Mr. Agnelorajesh Athaide has been in the real estate industry since 2008, 2009, 2007, 2008. According to him once you start working in multiple cities, especially in a city like Mumbai and get the experience as well as exposure to the methods & challenges that you need to manage, operating anywhere in the country is like a song.
Eventually, we face a lot of challenges during the construction period, but that knowledge aids us to look before a problem comes up. There are tremendous no.of problems that you might witness in a city like Mumbai or any part of the country. While we have such experiences, other things become a cakewalk. We never know what can be a possible challenge, thus before that challenge actually approaches we ought to get a solution in place.
Covid-19 and the Industry
One of the significant challenges in such a situation is the manpower which has run back to the villages. Getting them back is going to require quite a lot of time. The second challenge is going to be financial resources. The financial resources are going to get a little tighter anyway, as the banking industry has not been cooperative with the real estate industry for the last five years. Thirdly, as the priorities of people have changed, the demand to come back is less likely. Fortunately for St. Angelo’s VNCT Ventures is different.
They decided to deviate a little and go against the norms of the real estate industry. They decided to go into the field of getting into a lifestyle & appreciating products which are a bit less on the outskirts of metro cities. The outbreak of COVID-19 virus has created a situation where a lot of people would be interested in knowing about living in low-density areas, living close to the city but not far off. The density is going to be dangerous. This kind of consumer behavior is definitely going to help and increase the demand for real estate development on the outskirts of metro cities.
What is your next big goal, and what are the challenges you foresee?
“This lockdown period has been the best period of my life. We have worked on the management of my company. We have worked 16 to 18 hours a day. We have enjoyed it completely. Our vision is clear. My team and I work on an average of 14 hours a day. Their vision is clear with us. So we are going to unleash all the potential that we knew we had. But now we are unfolding. We have utilized technology to the key. We are going to get into multiple businesses. We are going to get into customers. So we are creating a product in real estate where the customer has to come to the fore. We’ll be getting into multiple sectors where the product will go to the customer. So geography status does not matter. Thanks to technology, thanks to former software, a new style of working and all that. Now we live in the office & that’s what we call home.” – Mr Agnelorajesh Athaide.
For the young ones coming into the field
Real estate is going to take a complete deviation from the existing path now. We are a country of millions of people. There’s a lot of panic among the population, and everybody is going to need houses & houses are a requirement irrespective of any factor. There needs to be the construction of new homes coming up so that every Indian citizen sleeps under a roof.
Thus, we are going to be a part of that industry as real estate is one of the top three job giving industries after agriculture and manufacturing. Hundreds of sectors depend on the real estate sector. But the game is going to change. The rules are going to change. Policies are going to change.
The field is now going to be a world of specialization, a world of whatever you want to be. Everything cannot be done by one person himself, anymore. Like every developer wanted to do everything himself by the land, get a design constructed, raise money, sell it. It’s all going to change. The land will be with somebody else & construction will be done by somebody else. The developer will be the aggregator; he’ll be the conductor. The financial execution will be somebody else’s, and selling will be done by somebody else. The capabilities of every individual involved with the real estate industry are going to become transparent. Performance is going to come under the scanner. It is going to go beneath the microscope. Our commitments are going to be monitored not on a monthly or quarterly or yearly basis. They’re going to be monitored on an hourly basis. All the tools are coming in place with productivity and performance.
You cannot be coming second or coming third in this race of life, be it for whichever sport you run; you have to come first. If you don’t come first, that opportunity goes off your hands. So, this is the time when we pull up our socks, be the best, be the most knowledgeable, be the most skilful, have the best resources in place, create a humongous network of resources which can stand by you, and seek for an opportunity to share it with others.
