The Grey Beard
Annual Letter

To our clients, past and present, and to anyone thinking seriously about South Delhi residential.

Every year, I find myself telling clients more or less the same things — where South Delhi is really headed, what we saw on the ground, what we did and, just as importantly, what we did not do. This letter is me telling all of them at once. It is the first annual letter I have written. I intend to write one every April from now on. It is not a press release. It is not a brochure. It is the clearest account I can give of our year and of the market we operate in.

We will not publish the exact numbers of our practice here. We do not share client details or transaction specifics in public, and we do not intend to. What we can say simply is this: the volume of business we did in FY 2025-26 was roughly double what we did in the year before, across deals, across aggregate value, and across the size of our NRI client base. We did it without changing what we do. We did not take on a single assignment outside South Delhi residential floors. We did not drift.

What we did not do

I want to start with what we did not do, because it is the more instructive half.

We were offered work we did not take. Hotel transactions, commercial portfolios, investment plays in asset categories well outside our specialty — several came to us through past clients and through our own network. One or two were very tempting. We said no to every single one.

We said no because I have seen, in twenty years in this business, what happens when a specialist practice begins to drift. The focus dilutes. The standards drift with it. By the time you realise you are operating in three markets badly rather than one market well, your best clients have moved on. South Delhi residential is what we understand. It is what we have spent two decades learning. Every year, we decide deliberately to become better at this one thing rather than adequate at many.

I will not rule out the possibility that we take on the occasional very large transaction outside South Delhi residential in the future — there are clients we have worked with for twenty years whom we will help when they ask, whatever the shape of the deal. But the rule is simple: if it threatens the quality or the focus of our South Delhi residential practice, it does not happen. That is the only test that matters.

What we did do

We spent the year doing two things: deepening the relationships we already had, and being useful to our clients in ways that were not strictly transactional.

Our NRI client base, roughly speaking, doubled over the year. Our number of closed mandates, roughly speaking, doubled. The aggregate value of transactions we advised on, roughly speaking, doubled. I do not share the exact figures because the exact figures are not the point. The point is the direction of travel, and the direction is that a small, disciplined practice, doing the same thing it did last year but with more conviction and more care, compounds quickly.

The work was well distributed across South Delhi. We closed transactions in New Friends Colony, Maharani Bagh, Niti Bagh, Anand Lok, Gulmohar Park, Safdarjung Development Area, Greater Kailash, Vasant Vihar, Saket, and several other colonies. The story of the year was not any one colony. The story was breadth. South Delhi is not a single market; it is a collection of micro-markets, each with its own liquidity, its own supply conditions, its own buyer profile. In FY 2025-26 we were active across all of them.

If I had to flag one colony that stood out, it would be New Friends Colony. Transaction activity in NFC picked up noticeably this year. More floors changed hands. Buyers who had been patient through 2024 moved. Sellers who had been holding quietly released inventory. NFC is a colony worth watching over the next twelve months.

On the full-cheque model, what actually changed

We have written and spoken at length about 100 per cent banking channel transactions. This year I will simply report what I have observed.

The demand for 100 per cent banking channel transactions has risen materially. When we began insisting on it years ago, it required both sides — and sometimes us — to accept that a deal would take longer. Today, the insistence works. We do not let either side drift from it. And while it may mean a transaction closes in six months rather than four, it closes fully, cleanly, and on a footing that holds up to any scrutiny a buyer, a seller, or the next generation of either family may ever bring.

That is a meaningful structural shift. More of our clients now arrive already expecting the full-cheque standard rather than needing to be persuaded into it. When clients who start out elsewhere eventually come to us, they come, more often than not, because they have realised what they want from a transaction is exactly what we have been offering for years.

What happened in the market itself

We are publishing a separate Annual Market Report alongside this letter that covers the data in full and places South Delhi in the context of other Indian luxury residential markets. Read that if you want the complete picture. In this letter I will keep the market observations short and only as sharp as I can make them.

Two points are worth stating plainly.

Prices rose sharply. The Golden Growth Fund's pricing research published this year showed that average floor prices in high-premium and premium South Delhi colonies rose between 22 and 34 per cent in calendar year 2025. Ultra-premium stock — the Lutyens bungalow enclaves like Golf Links and Sunder Nagar, and the non-Lutyens ultra-premium enclaves like Jor Bagh, Westend and Shanti Niketan — trades at values meaningfully higher still, on its own pricing plane. A buyer who began looking in January and took twelve months to decide was, on average, staring at a floor worth a quarter to a third more by the time they decided. This was not a speculative frenzy. It was the arithmetic of extreme supply tightness meeting real, cheque-backed demand.

The single colony where we saw this price jump most clearly was Anand Lok. Anand Lok has no meaningful supply coming on line. It is central. It is elite. It is loved by almost every category of buyer — families, returning NRIs, senior professionals, promoter exits. And by the standards of South Delhi, when something does come up in Anand Lok, it is unusually liquid. Put those four things together in a year where capital was looking for a home, and the result is a price chart that moves on a near-straight line upward.

Five forces are commonly cited for the year, and of them, the two we felt most directly in our own practice were the supply squeeze and the emergence of ten crore rupees as the new entry ticket for the high-premium segment. The other three — the NRI return, the rotation of Gurgaon capital, and the rise of full-cheque as the default — all happened and all mattered, and we saw evidence of each. But the two forces that shaped our day-to-day decisions most were the ones about supply and about price thresholds. Below ₹10 Crore in a genuine high-premium colony is, increasingly, either a substandard offering or a mispriced one. Above ₹10 Crore, the pool of qualified buyers is narrower, but the ones left are serious. Ultra-premium sits meaningfully higher, in a tier of its own.

The year ahead

I expect FY 2026-27 to be less dramatic than the year we just had. I do not expect a reversal. On pricing, my view is stability with a steady climb. Roughly 3 to 5 per cent per quarter in the segments we operate in. That does not sound spectacular, but over four quarters it compounds to a meaningful double-digit appreciation annually, well above general inflation and, more importantly, well above the luxury segment's own cost inflation, which is materially higher than the Consumer Price Index you read about in newspapers. The relevant benchmark for our clients is not general inflation; it is the rate at which the things luxury owners actually buy — floors in scarce colonies, central real estate, the goods and services that accompany that lifestyle — become more expensive. On that measure, South Delhi floors have kept pace and then some.

On supply, nothing structural changes. South Delhi is not adding land. Redevelopment continues, but at a pace that will not come close to meeting the appetite. Ultra-premium and the top of the high-premium band will remain supply-starved. The rest of the high-premium band and the premium colonies will continue to produce most of the transaction volume, simply because there is more to transact. The upper-mid colonies — where most first-time South Delhi buyers enter the market — will continue to do the same job they have always done.

On buyers, expect the NRI share to grow further. The NRI picture this year was shaped by more than just tax and trade news. There is a war going on in the Middle East, and a number of India-origin families based in the Gulf have either moved back to India or are keeping an alternate home in South Delhi ready just in case. That is an added, and I think under-appreciated, layer sitting on top of the more familiar drivers from the UK and the US. Expect family offices to deploy more meaningfully into South Delhi residential as a partial substitute for fixed-income allocation. Expect the rotation of Gurgaon liquidity to continue, at a more moderate pace than this year, as those buyers' realised profits get redeployed.

The question most clients ask is whether prices can correct. They can, but not, in my view, without a broader macro liquidity shock. In a normal year, the structural supply constraint acts as a floor beneath the market. This is not a prediction. It is an observation about the shape of the market itself.

How we work

One closing thought, more principle than forecast.

Grey Beard is a small practice. It is deliberately small. We do not intend to grow by scaling the number of mandates we take on; we intend to grow by doing a better version of what we already do. That means more time per client, not less. More time understanding each colony we work in, not less. More judgment in which mandates we accept, not less.

If you are a client and you are reading this — thank you. The great majority of the work this year came from people we had already worked with, or from people whom they introduced to us. We do not take that lightly. If you are reading this and you are not yet a client — what we have described above is what working with us looks like. If that is the kind of transaction you want to do, we would be glad to talk. If not, we would rather you know now than find out later.

For the full data view, the cross-market comparisons, and the methodology behind our market observations, please see our Annual Market Report, published alongside this letter. For the view on any individual South Delhi colony — we cover 48 of them, each on its own page, with the plot-size patterns, block-level premiums, and other factors that shape pricing — visit greybeard.in.