BENGALURU: From launching its first project, Brigade Towers, to completing approximately 110 million square feet of real estate development, Brigade Group has grown over four decades by expanding its portfolio and taking on increasingly ambitious projects, its founder and chairman M R Jaishankar has said.
In a video published by Brigade Group to mark its 40th anniversary, Jaishankar looked back at the company’s growth, from its early years as a small business to its expansion into large integrated mixed-use developments.
“When we started our first project, Brigade Towers, it was planned as just a single project. We did not have any vision of building a real estate company with one project after another,” he said.
The success of Brigade Towers gave him the confidence to take up more projects, eventually laying the foundation for the company’s growth. Jaishankar described the first decade as a period when the business was still small.
A significant milestone came in 2002, when Brigade launched Brigade Millennium in JP Nagar. Jaishankar described it as Bengaluru’s first mixed-use development project. The project was challenging, he said, as some architects had refused to design it because they believed the site was unsuitable for development. Its eventual success encouraged the company to pursue larger projects.
This led to Brigade Gateway, an integrated mixed-use development that brought together multiple real estate components, including residential, office, hospitality, retail, social infrastructure, healthcare and education. Executed between 2006 and 2011, the project was a major step in the company’s expansion, he said.
During this period, Brigade Group also went public, raising funds through an equity offering. Becoming a listed company, however, brought greater pressure to demonstrate growth every quarter and every year, Jaishankar said.
Reflecting on the company’s expansion, he said Brigade had significantly increased the scale of its operations over successive decades. The company grew from one million square feet of development in its first decade to 10 million square feet in its first 20 years. It has since completed approximately 110 million square feet, according to Jaishankar.
“It has been good growth. Growth is, I would say, a way of life,” he said.
