By AI Powered PMC Akbar Jiwani, Special Correspondent: Real Estate for RealNewsofIndia.com
India has moved into the “Transparent” tier of global property markets for the first time, climbing five places to rank 26th out of 88 countries in JLL’s Global Real Estate Transparency Index (GRETI) 2026 — up from 31st in the previous edition. The jump makes India the best-improving real estate market in the Asia-Pacific region this cycle and places it among the world’s top five most-improved markets, according to the report released this week.
The GRETI, published every two years by property consultancy JLL, scores 146 city markets across 88 countries on a scale of 1 to 5 using 260 individual factors covering regulation, transaction processes, listed-market performance and sustainability disclosure. Lower scores indicate greater transparency. India’s climb was driven overwhelmingly by reform in its regulatory and legal framework, where the country jumped from 37th to 19th place globally — its strongest single-category gain — and from 9th to 6th within Asia-Pacific.
“India did not just improve this year; it set the pace for Asia Pacific,” said Radha Dhir, CEO of JLL India. “Moving from 31st to 26th globally and ranking among the top five most-improved markets worldwide reflects a market that is compounding gains, not chasing a single good year.”
Officials at JLL attributed the gains to a decade of overlapping reforms: the maturing of the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, or RERA; liberalised foreign direct investment norms; the Digital Personal Data Protection Act; measures in the Union Budget 2026-27; and a push toward digitised land records through the National Urban Digital Mission, the NAKSHA platform and the Digital India Land Records Modernisation Programme. The report also credited SEBI’s Business Responsibility and Sustainability Reporting framework and the National Green Building Mission, launched in 2025, with lifting India’s sustainability score from 29th to 27th globally.
Capital markets data released alongside the index underline the shift. Private equity inflows into Indian real estate touched $10.5 billion in 2025, a 17 per cent rise year-on-year, with a further $4.3 billion in the first half of 2026 alone — up 25 per cent on the same period last year. Direct investment over the past twelve months hit $8.1 billion, JLL said, a 20-year high for the sector.
“The direct investment we saw this year, a 20-year high, is not the ceiling; it is the foundation we are building on,” said Lata Pillai, JLL’s Senior Managing Director and Head of Capital Markets, India. Pillai pointed to India’s real estate investment trust (REIT) market as a particular bright spot: listed office REIT stock has grown 58 per cent, from 104 million square feet in 2024 to 164 million square feet in 2026, with close to half of the country’s Grade A office stock now considered REIT-worthy.
Sustainability metrics also improved sharply on the ground. The share of green-certified Grade A office space in India rose from roughly 39 per cent in 2020 to 66 per cent in the first half of 2026, with certified buildings now commanding rental premiums of 10 to 15 per cent over uncertified stock — a signal that occupiers and investors are increasingly pricing in environmental compliance.
The report flagged the country’s fast-growing data centre sector as a related growth pole: current capacity of roughly 1.6 gigawatts is projected to nearly quadruple to 6 gigawatts by 2029, requiring an estimated $110 billion in fresh capital.
Even with the leap forward, JLL cautioned that India remains short of the “Highly Transparent” tier occupied by markets such as the United Kingdom, France, Australia, the United States and the Netherlands, which topped this year’s index. The report identified gaps still to close: voluntary rather than mandatory Scope 3 emissions disclosure, the absence of formal building-performance and public energy-usage disclosure regulation, no biodiversity-risk reporting standards, and the need to extend the Green Building Mission beyond new construction to existing stock. JLL’s suggested path forward includes deeper fund-structure disclosure, stronger credit-market intelligence, verified real-time building-performance data and wider use of AI-driven due diligence tools.
For India’s real estate sector — long criticised by global investors for opacity around land titles, project delays and regulatory inconsistency — the GRETI 2026 result offers concrete evidence that a decade of legislative and digital reform is beginning to show up in the numbers that matter most to institutional capital.
