For most building materials sales teams in India, “project sales” is a shorthand for residential project sales. The developer. The housing complex. The 400-unit apartment block in Pune or Bengaluru where you’re trying to get your tile or stone into the specification before the contractor locks the bill of quantities.
That mental model — project sales equals residential — made complete sense for the past several years, when residential real estate was absorbing large amounts of institutional capital and driving construction activity across the country’s major cities.
The capital flows have shifted. And the specification pipeline for building materials needs to shift with them.
Colliers India’s H1 2026 institutional investment report, released in early July, tells a story that every project-focused sales team in this industry should read carefully. Institutional investment in India’s real estate sector hit $4.5 billion in the first half of 2026 — a 50% year-on-year increase and the strongest opening half in six years. But where that money went is not where most sales teams are looking.
Office assets attracted $1.9 billion — over 40% of total inflows. Data centres and industrial warehousing drew approximately $800 million each. Hospitality investments tripled year on year to $300 million. Residential? It fell 43% year on year to just $500 million, reflecting investor caution around rising construction costs and moderating housing sales.
The money has moved. The construction activity following that money is where the building materials procurement opportunity now sits.
What $1.9 Billion in Office Investment Actually Means on the Ground
India’s office market absorbed 35.7 million square feet of Grade A space in H1 2026 — up 6% year on year. GCCs alone accounted for roughly 44% of all Grade A office leasing in Q1 2026, a record quarterly share. Chennai and Bengaluru together drove 27% of all institutional real estate investment in H1 2026, with office assets accounting for 85 to 95% of investment in both cities. India now hosts more than 2,100 GCCs contributing close to $100 billion in revenue, with projections to cross 2,500 centres by 2030.
Every one of those GCC offices being fitted out right now is a building materials procurement event. And it is a fundamentally different procurement event from a residential project.
A GCC office fit-out requires large-format porcelain tile for lobby and common areas. Premium stone or engineered stone for reception surfaces, boardroom tables, and director cabin finishes. High-specification sanitaryware for washrooms that need to handle hundreds of daily users and meet global corporate hygiene standards. Anti-static flooring solutions for technology zones. The product specification is higher than residential, the quantities per project are significant — a 50,000 square foot office floor can consume 3,000 to 4,500 square metres of flooring material — and crucially, the payment discipline is dramatically better. A GCC procurement team working to a global fit-out budget does not run on the contractor credit cycle that plagues residential project supply. Payments follow procurement milestones.
Cushman & Wakefield’s India fit-out cost guide puts average office fit-out costs in Mumbai at approximately ₹6,567 per square foot for a collaborative hybrid environment. Even at more conservative specifications in Bengaluru or Hyderabad — which remain 20 to 30% more cost-competitive than Mumbai — the flooring, wall tile, and sanitaryware component of a large GCC fit-out is a meaningful number.
For specification teams that have been focusing almost entirely on residential developers, the GCC office pipeline is a new market sitting largely unclaimed by the tile and stone industry’s existing sales structure.
Warehousing and Logistics: The Category Nobody Is Pitching
Industrial and warehousing assets attracted $800 million in institutional investment in H1 2026 — the same quantum as data centres, and nearly 18% of the total institutional real estate pie. This is capital flowing into logistics parks, cold chain warehouses, e-commerce fulfilment centres, and manufacturing-linked industrial facilities.
The building materials opportunity in warehousing is less glamorous than a GCC lobby in anti-static large-format porcelain, but it is highly repeatable, very large in scale, and almost completely uncontested by organised tile brands.
Large logistics facilities require heavy-duty industrial flooring in dock areas, loading bays, and sorting floors — epoxy-coated or polymer-modified screeds in production and handling zones, ceramic or vitrified tile in administrative blocks, staff canteens, and washroom facilities. A 3 lakh square foot logistics warehouse easily consumes 8,000 to 15,000 square metres of flooring in its non-storage areas alone. Multiply that by the scale of investment going into industrial real estate and the volume begins to look interesting.
The procurement structure in warehousing is also favourable. Institutional investors and REITs backing large logistics parks have professional procurement teams, follow structured tendering processes, and maintain payment discipline. The risk profile is significantly better than a speculative residential developer managing cash flow between buyer instalments.
Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities are now active in this segment. The Colliers data specifically calls out Hosur, Coimbatore, Kochi, and Ujjain as recipients of institutional warehousing and industrial investment in H1 2026. These are markets where organised tile brands have relatively thin specification presence — which means the competitive intensity for getting into these projects is lower, not higher.
Hospitality: A Tripling That the Industry Has Barely Noticed
The hospitality sector’s $300 million in institutional investment in H1 2026 — more than three times the H1 2025 figure — is the most overlooked number in the Colliers report for building materials teams.
Hotel construction and renovation is one of the highest-specification use cases for tiles, stone, and sanitaryware in any building category. A mid-market business hotel with 150 keys requires tiles in every room bathroom, corridor flooring, lobby and restaurant areas, pool surrounds, and spa facilities. The product requirements are exacting — slip resistance, durability under high traffic, ease of maintenance, consistent shade and calibre across large quantities — and the design brief typically involves an architect or interior consultant who makes specification decisions well before procurement opens.
Premium hotels going through renovation cycles are a particularly interesting target. India’s hospitality sector has been refurbishing aggressively as travel demand recovered and international chains expanded their India presence. A refurbishment of an existing 200-room property is a contained procurement event with a clear timeline, a professional project management team, and a budget that is already approved. These are the kinds of projects that specification teams can identify, build relationships around, and convert — if they know to look for them.
The tripling of hospitality investment in one year suggests this is not a one-off quarter. Tier 2 cities are specifically mentioned in the Colliers data as beneficiaries of hospitality capital, driven by domestic tourism and business travel growth. For specification teams that have been city-focused, hospitality investment in markets like Coorg, Kochi, and Ujjain is a signal worth following.
Why the Procurement Process Is Different — and Why That’s an Advantage
The building materials industry has spent decades learning how to navigate the residential project procurement cycle — which DPR consultants to know, when the bill of quantities gets finalised, how to manage the contractor relationship, how to deal with specification dilution when a project’s budget gets squeezed.
Commercial, warehousing, and hospitality procurement works differently, and in most ways more favourably.
Specifications are made earlier and change less frequently. A GCC fit-out brief is locked at the design stage because global companies have procurement standards and interior design guidelines that govern what goes into their offices. The tile brand specified in the design brief is almost always the tile brand that gets purchased, because there is no equivalent of the residential market’s informal “substitution” culture where a contractor quietly replaces specified material with a cheaper alternative.
Payment terms are more structured. Commercial real estate projects with institutional backing follow formal procurement and payment milestones. There are fewer disputes, fewer last-minute renegotiations, and fewer situations where material has been delivered and installed but payment is delayed by three quarters because the developer is waiting for buyer instalments to come in.
Project timelines are more predictable. GCC fit-outs are often on 45 to 90-day schedules from lease signing to occupation. That kind of timeline creates urgency in procurement but also clarity — the project either happens or it doesn’t, and when it happens it moves fast. For a specification team used to tracking residential projects with 36-month construction timelines and shifting procurement windows, commercial projects are refreshingly direct.
The relationships are also different. Residential project specification happens through contractors, developers, and architects. Commercial project specification happens through interior design firms, project management consultants, and global procurement teams. Building the right relationships in the commercial specification world requires a different approach — more technical, more standards-aware, more design-conversation capable — but the payoff is longer-lasting. A GCC that specifies your tile brand in Bengaluru today is likely using the same brand in its next facility in Hyderabad or Pune, because global companies standardise their fit-out specifications across markets.
Reweighting Your Pipeline Without Abandoning Residential
This is not an argument for abandoning residential project sales. The housing delivery pipeline over FY27 to FY29 is real and substantial, and the companies that ignore it will be leaving large volumes on the table.
It is an argument for deliberately reweighting. Most project specification teams in the tile, stone, and sanitaryware industry currently allocate 80 to 90% of their pipeline effort to residential developers. Given the investment data from H1 2026, a more balanced allocation — perhaps 60% residential, 30% commercial office and GCC, 10% warehousing and hospitality — better reflects where construction activity is actually concentrating.
The practical steps to make that shift are not complicated. Map the active GCC office construction and fit-out projects in your key cities. Identify the interior design and project management consultancy firms doing the most commercial fit-out work in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Gurugram — these are your entry points into the commercial specification chain. Develop a product portfolio brief specifically for GCC and commercial applications: the slip resistance ratings, the LEED-compatible credentials, the anti-static options, the large-format stone-look porcelain that delivers a premium lobby aesthetic within a fit-out budget.
And start tracking hospitality projects in Tier 2 markets the same way you track residential projects in metro corridors. The investment has already moved there. The construction is following. The building materials procurement will follow the construction.
The money doesn’t stay still. Your pipeline shouldn’t either.
References
- Colliers India H1 2026 Report / BizzBuzz — https://www.bizzbuzz.news/industry/realestate/india-real-estate-investment-hits-45-billion-h1-2026-1396385
- Colliers India Full Report / The Realty Today — https://therealtytoday.com/news/market-insights/institutional-real-estate-investments-rise-50-in-h1-2026-led-by-domestic-capital-colliers-india-report/
- Square Yards — Colliers H1 2026 Breakdown — https://www.squareyards.com/blog/institutional-real-estate-investments-in-india-jump-to-4-5-billion-in-h1-2026
- Sirf Broker — India Office Market GCC H1 2026 — https://sirfbroker.io/india-office-market-h1-2026-gcc-broker-guide/
- Awfis — GCC in India 2026 Workspace Strategy — https://www.awfis.com/inspiration/workplace-insights/articles/gcc-in-india-workspace-strategy-2026
- Tablespace — GCC Setup in India — https://tablespace.com/gcc-setup-in-india/
- JLL — Global Office Fit-Out Costs Guide 2026 — https://www.jll.com/en-us/guides/global-office-fit-out-costs-guide
- Cushman & Wakefield — Office Fit Out Cost India 2026 — https://www.cushmanwakefield.com/en/india/insights/office-fit-out-cost-guide
- Zyeta — GCC Carbon-Neutral Office Design 2026 — https://www.zyeta.com/blogs/07-design-strategies-you-need-to-build-a-carbon-neutral-gcc-office/
- Whalesbook — India Real Estate H1 2026 — https://www.whalesbook.com/news/English/real-estate/Indian-Real-Estate-Attracts-dollar45-Billion-In-H1-2026-Six-Year-High/6a475aec003e8c7640ef8549
