India’s office market and the global services economy

Software-services exports were US$132.4 billion in April–December 2025, on the Reserve Bank’s provisional nine-month column. That is the external income behind a large share of the office floors a global tenant recognises: campuses and towers staffed by people doing work for a client or a parent elsewhere. Other business services and domestic headquarters add more floors. Together they are still a corridor story.

Where the lease is signed

Bandra-Kurla and Lower Parel; the Outer Ring Road, Whitefield and Electronic City; Gurugram and Noida rather than Lutyens’ Delhi; HITEC City and the Financial District; the OMR and Guindy; Hinjawadi, Kharadi and Magarpatta. Leases exist outside those names. The institutional market a foreign reader usually means sits mostly inside them. The NCR’s newer offices were built in Gurugram and Noida, outside the capital’s historic core. Mumbai’s old centre and its newer office district serve different tenants.

A campus lease and a tower split among many small occupiers trade as different assets. Global capability centres concentrate credit risk in a few parents. Indian services exporters concentrate it in a hiring cycle. Startups occupy a thinner slice of the same buildings. They do not explain the skyline.

What the office does to housing

Staff rent along the commute for years, and some buy. In Bengaluru and Hyderabad the rental pool is other technology salaries, and it slackens when hiring slackens. In Mumbai the professional renter is one demand among end users who are staying in the city. No vacancy rate is printed here. The mechanism is what the page is for.

Listed office REITs, under SEBI’s regulations, are a way to hold completed rent-earning floors without buying a building. The asset list and the leverage are in the offer document. A distribution describes the current vehicle. It is a poor forecast of the next leasing cycle, and it says nothing about house prices.