INDIA CLIMBS TO 26TH SPOT IN GLOBAL REAL ESTATE TRANSPARENCY RANKINGS, EMERGES ASIA-PACIFIC’S TOP IMPROVER
By AI Powered PMC Akbar Jiwani, Special Correspondent – Real Estate, Realnewsofindia.com
India has entered the ranks of the world’s top 30 most transparent real estate markets for the first time, climbing five places to 26th position globally in the 2026 Global Real Estate Transparency Index (GRETI) published by property consultancy JLL, moving the country into the index’s “Transparent” tier and marking one of the sharpest year-on-year gains recorded anywhere in the world.
The GRETI report, which scores 88 countries and 146 city markets across 260 individual factors, ranked India among the top five most-improved real estate markets globally and named it the single best-performing market in the Asia-Pacific region this cycle. JLL data also shows India posting the fourth-best transparency improvement globally over a ten-year horizon and the third-best over twenty years, underlining a sustained rather than one-off climb up the rankings. The United Kingdom topped the 2026 index, followed by France, Australia, the United States and the Netherlands.
“India did not just improve this year; it set the pace for Asia Pacific,” said Radha Dhir, Chief Executive Officer, India, JLL. “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.”
The report credits a cluster of government-led reforms for the jump. The maturing implementation of the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act (RERA) across states was cited as a central driver, alongside continued liberalisation of foreign direct investment norms in the sector. Digitisation of land records also featured prominently, with JLL pointing to the National Urban Digital Mission (NUDM), the NAKSHA scheme and the Digital India Land Records Modernisation Programme (DILRMP) as measures that have improved title clarity and reduced transaction friction. Investment provisions in the Union Budget 2026-27, along with expanding renewable and nuclear energy capacity targets tied to infrastructure growth, were also flagged as supporting factors.
The steepest gain came in the regulatory and legal transparency sub-index, where India jumped from 37th to 19th place globally, and from 9th to 6th within Asia-Pacific, the single largest sub-category improvement in this year’s report. India’s transaction-process ranking held steady at 10th globally and 3rd in Asia-Pacific, while its listed-market score edged up marginally from 36th to 35th. On sustainability, India improved to 27th globally from 29th, helped by the SEBI-mandated Business Responsibility and Sustainability Report (BRSR) framework, the National Green Building Mission launched in 2025, and the phased rollout of the Digital Personal Data Protection Act.
The transparency gains coincide with a marked rise in investor appetite. According to Lata Pillai, Senior Managing Director and Head of Capital Markets, India, at JLL, direct real estate investment into India touched a 20-year high of 8.1 billion dollars over the past twelve months. “The direct investment we saw this year, a 20-year high, is not the ceiling; it is the foundation we are building on. Private equity flows are already up 17 per cent year-on-year, reaching 10.5 billion dollars in 2025,” Pillai said, adding that private equity inflows rose a further 25 per cent year-on-year to 4.3 billion dollars in the first half of 2026 alone.
Pillai also pointed to rapid expansion in India’s listed real estate space: office REIT stock has grown 58 per cent, from 104 million square feet in 2024 to 164 million square feet in 2026, with nearly half of the country’s Grade A office stock now considered “REIT-worthy.” Separately, JLL estimates India’s data centre pipeline will require 110 billion dollars in capital by 2029, with capacity projected to quadruple from 1.6 gigawatts to 6 gigawatts over the same period. Green-certified Grade A office stock has risen 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 non-certified space.
Looking ahead, JLL laid out four priorities it believes could push India from “most improved” to what Pillai described as “genuinely institutional grade”: deepening disclosure standards across fund structures and asset classes beyond office real estate, strengthening credit-market intelligence, establishing real-time building-performance metrics, and deploying artificial intelligence to streamline due diligence processes.
For India’s real estate sector, long characterised by fragmented records and regulatory unevenness across states, the GRETI 2026 ranking offers an independent, internationally benchmarked signal that reform efforts of the past decade are translating into measurable, investor-facing outcomes – a trend that, if sustained, could further accelerate institutional capital flows into Indian property markets in the years ahead.
(Data and quotes sourced from JLL’s Global Real Estate Transparency Index 2026 report, as reported by Business Standard and The Week, September 18, 2026.)
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