1. The 16th National Convention (NATCON) of the Confederation of Real Estate Developers' Associations of India (CREDAI) was held at the Pudong Kerry Hotel in Shanghai from 3 – 5 August 2016. Over 800 member developers and experts from the real estate sector, senior professionals from the financial world and ancillary industries participated–which included CEO’s from Prestige Group, Magarpatta, Rustomjees, Vascon, Sigmaone among several others.

2. The three-day long convention, with the theme of ‘Embracing Change’, was aimed at facilitating knowledge and learning of the global best practices in the industry against the backdrop of two largest developing and competitive economies- China and India. The Chinese experience of real estate development and infrastructure development was a key learning objective for the participating delegtes.

3. For the first time CREDAI hosted an exclusive CREDAI International Business Forum (CIBF) B2B 2016 Expo at the Convention. The expo offered the CREDAI members an excellent opportunity for networking and interacting with more than 50 Chinese vendors and manufacturers under one roof. These Chinese companies had been supplying real estate project related components to these Indian participating companies over the last few years, and put on display some of their products of recent vintage for the benefit of the Indian participants.

4. The NATCON and the CIBF B2B expo was inaugurated by Ambassador Vijay Keshav Gokhale and the office bearers of CREDAI including Chairman, Mr Irfan Razack, President, Mr. Getamber Anand and President – Elect, Mr. Jaxay Shah. Ambassador Gokhale in his inaugural address appreciated the choice of Shanghai as the venue for the national convention of CREDAI and urged the developers to learn from global best practices, particularly from the experiences of China’s development of real estate sector in recent past and replicate them in projects in India, in particular, under the flagship programmes launched by Prime Minister Modi including the “Smart City”, and “Housing for All” among others.

6. Mr, Irfan Razack, Chairman of CREDAI, in his keynote address concurred with the views of Ambassador and agreed that it was high time for developers to reinvent themselves. He added that the choice of Shanghai was apt as Shanghai served as an inspirational example for CREDAI to emulate for development of real estate in India.

7. The notable speakers at the annual convention in some of the other panels included Hon’ble Member of Parliament Mr. Shashi Tharoor, Mr. James Law (Founder and CEO of Cybertechture), Mr. Pranay Chulet (Chief Executive Officer, Quikr), acclaimed Bollywood actor, Mr. Sanjay Dutt, Film Actor amongst others. The detailed programme is placed in Annex-I

8. Established in 1999, CREDAI is the apex body representing 11,500 private Real Estate developers spread across 23 state level chapters and 162 cities in India. The National Convention of CREDAI, called NATCON is organized every year at a location outside India serves the knowledge enhancing and peer to peer functions of CREDAI. Fifteen NATCONs organized so far have seen attendance of about 800 members and experts, every year on an average, from the real estate sector, senior professionals from the financial world and ancillary industries. NATCON enables CREDAI members to understand emerging global trends in the real estate industry.

9. As an outcome the 16th NATCOM, it is expected that greater synergies in the real estate and construction sector would be forged between the leading companies from India and China. One of China’s leading real estate companies, i.e. Country Garden Real Estate has expressed interest in partnering with Indian counterpart to execute real estate projects in India and expected to visit India to explore JV options later next month.

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