Inspired by a 1978 Bollywood blockbuster, Sushil Mantri veered away from his family’s textile business to start Mantri Developers, a real estate company in 1999. Thirteen years hence, Mantri has more than one crore sq ft of constructed area to its credit including 6,000 homes and 20 commercial and educational projects across Bangalore, Chennai, Hyderabad and Pune. What’s next? Retirement, claims Mantri, as he plans to take it a little easy now. 

Those who run after you before to give you money will run after you to get their money back during a recession.” 

I grew up in Pune in a business family. My father was a wholesale dealer of textiles. Up until I was in Class 10, I wanted to be a civil engineer. But, around that time, my father fell ill. Because he was hospitalised, I had to manage his business for two months. That changed my life. I loved being in business, and decided that was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. 

After watching Trishul, Mantri was convinced that real estate was the space for him.

That resolve got stronger after watching the Amitabh Bachchan-Sanjeev Kumar starrer Trishul in 1978.  Bachchan’s character in the movie inspired me to get into real estate. I wanted to be like him—a young man who comes from a small city to a big town, becomes a developer and gradually rises to take on the city’s biggest developer. My elder brother Sunil was also completely taken up by the movie. So, in 1983, when our father was looking to diversify his business, we decided to build a real estate vertical. We poured all our returns from the textile business into real estate. In fact, three years after we began real estate, we decided to shut down our textile division to totally focus on realty. 

Because of the real estate business, I frequently travelled to Abu Dhabi, Dubai and Sharjah. Many of our buyers there were from South India. Everytime we tried to sell our Pune properties to them, they’d ask us to come up with a similar development in Bangalore too. Each one of them wanted to buy a property in South India. I realised this meant a great long-term business opportunity in Bangalore. In 1999, I founded Mantri Developers there even though the property market was a little slow at the time. Slow downs don’t scare me though. A few years (around the late 1980s) after we began our Pune realty business, there was a recession too. Many developers found themselves in financial trouble. The general mood was that every developer would meet the same fate. 

Instead, that recession taught me some great business lessons. Those who run after you before to give you money will run after you to get their money back during a recession. So, a business needs to tighten its belt, cut expenditure, stop unviable projects, and focus on finishing projects quickly. But, a recession isn’t an isolated phenomenon—it equally impacts your cement supplier, contractors and labour.  So, you can get good rates from them. Also, more than in good times, you can really win your customers for life if you demonstrate strength during this period. I believe the deeper the recession, the greater  the opportunity it offers for increased growth.  Someone has rightly said that good judgment comes from bad experience and good experience comes from bad judgment. 

Following those lessons, we successfully launched our first residential project Mantri Woodlands in 1999. Basically, we wanted to make affordable housing because apartments in Bangalore used to be quite large in those days. So, we designed 800-900 sq ft apartments, much like the type you find in Mumbai, and kept the price below Rs10 lakhs. We got a phenomenal response, mainly because we got our customer target right. We focused our marketing efforts on Infosys employees. The company had then launched a scheme of offering its employees interest-free loans. 

Someone has rightly said that good judgment comes from bad experience and good experience comes from bad judgment. 

From affordable homes, we gradually moved to ultra-luxurious apartments with the Mantri Altius project in 2001. At that time, people used to believe that if you live in flats, you aren’t as well off as those who live in bungalows. I wanted to change that mindset. I wanted to build single-story, 6,000 sq ft apartments that had rooms as large as those in villas. Residents were invited to buy these apartments. Many people, including my housing finance company officials, thought it was a crazy idea and advised me not to go ahead with it. The largest apartments then were about 2,500 sq ft. But, I was convinced that there was a niche market for Altius.

Initially when we had launched those apartments, the response was tepid. But, eventually my gut paid off.  We developed a screening process for buyers, and interviewed each and every applicant before letting them live in Altius. And even though this is one of our smallest projects in terms of size, it has  given us an incredible amount of visibility and brand equity. It established us as a differentiated real estate player. The key learning from here was that real estate project becomes popular not because of who has built the houses, but because of those who live in them. The “club membership” concept helped us get together like-minded people who made for a great community. Even now, many people know us because of Altius. 

In fact, it’s this brand equity that helped us get Morgan Stanley on board as an investor. In 2005, the government had allowed FDI in real estate. And a year later, Morgan Stanley invested Rs300 crore in Mantri. Our turnover was around  Rs300 crore then, and we preferred a private equity infusion instead of launching an IPO because when a small-sized company goes for an IPO, it gets lost in the crowd. In hindsight, that was the right decision. I learnt a very valuable idea when dealing with investors or clients—always under promise, and over deliver. Instead of painting a rosy picture, give a conservative estimate of  your deliverables. Overachieving your targets is the biggest positive impression you can leave. 

I’ve been in business for more than three decades now. For me, running a business is like riding a bicycle, you just have to keep pedaling. The moment you stop, you know what will happen to you. Now, I am looking forward to my son—who has recently joined  us—to pedal away so that I can take a back seat and retire in the next three to five years. I look forward to the day when I’ll stop being the MD-cum-chairman of Mantri Developers, and just be the chairman.