Solving for Location: A New Way to Evaluate India’s Office Markets

By Rohan Bhattacharyya, Marketing Manager – Altre Digital

When companies plan for business expansion, choosing the right city often becomes a high-stakes decision.

It’s rarely about rental costs alone or which location looks most attractive on paper. More often, it’s about how talent, infrastructure, cost, and competition come together, and how those factors behave in relation to your team structure, product roadmap, and headcount targets. Market reports tend to flatten these dynamics, leaving companies with a limited view. This tool was built to correct for that.

Introducing the Business Location Advisory Tool on Altre, a framework built for teams managing location strategy with accountability. This tool helps real estate, strategy, and operations teams evaluate Indian office markets using a structured, data-led framework. It’s designed for companies that want to make deliberate, evidence-backed decisions when it comes to expansion, relocation, or rebalancing their footprint.

Why This Matters

Across India’s enterprise leasing landscape, 8 to 10 cities tend to dominate attention. But not every city works for every team. Even within metros, micro-markets vary widely in cost, access, and liveability.

The challenge isn’t deciding where to expand. It’s understanding which city, and which corridor, makes sense for your operating model.

We’ve seen companies revisit entire site selection plans after viewing competitor distribution heatmaps or market saturation indicators. Others have benefited from shifting to high-supply, low-density zones outside the usual CBD hotspots.

These decisions typically take weeks of analysis. This tool compresses that process into a structured, transparent dashboard with real-time logic.

How It Works

The tool aggregates and normalizes data across key vectors and returns city-level rankings based on configurable weightage.

Inputs include:

• Macro and domain-specific talent availability

• Rental benchmarks and absorption by micro-market

• Competitor density and office distribution

• Infrastructure stress, commute patterns, and regulatory factors

• Upcoming supply of Grade A office space

• Policy incentives and ease-of-doing-business indices
  
  

You can tune the model depending on what matters more to your organisation; talent concentration, real estate cost, competition exposure, or growth capacity. For example, a cost-focused team might emphasize rental rates and vacancy. A team focused on delivery quality may weight talent access and market maturity higher.

Whether you're planning office relocation or opening a second site, the tool offers a shared ground truth across teams.

What You Get

The tool is designed for real decisions. Ones that affect teams, budgets, and timelines. It surfaces patterns that help answer questions companies often struggle with. Where are hiring pipelines strongest? What’s the real cost of being near your competitors? Which cities are balancing growth with available space? How saturated is a given market, and what will the cost trajectory look like two years from now?

Cities are scored and ranked using a dynamic scoring model that reflects your business priorities. The output layers in talent flow data, live leasing trends, and commentary on opportunities and risk factors, all contextualized by industry. Hiring density, department mix, and even firm-level demand footprints are factored in.

This goes beyond city comparison in India by market averages. It gives your team the inputs it needs to move from exploration to structured analysis.

The output includes:

• A ranked list of Indian cities with normalized scores

• A heatmap showing competitive density

• Contextual commentary on each city’s opportunity/risk profile

• Talent and job distribution by function, company, and industry

• Submarket-level intelligence on absorption and upcoming supply

• Company-level demand snapshots and real transaction benchmarks

All of this is returned instantly in the interface once priorities are configured.

What Makes This Different

Much of commercial real estate in India is still navigated through partial intel and siloed reports. Teams often rely on anecdotal feedback, local brokers, or last year’s assumptions. That works until scale or cost efficiency becomes a constraint.

This tool introduces structure. It’s built on four principles:

• Configurability: Every business has different pressure points. The model adjusts accordingly.
  Transparency: Each score is linked back to the underlying data, so nothing is opaque.

• Speed: Results update in real time, with no dependency on external reports.

• Relevance: Each metric connects directly to real estate, hiring, or operational outcomes.
  
  

It’s built for a wide range of verticals, and adjusts intelligently for consulting, IT, BPO, fintech, and more. Whether you’re evaluating business expansion strategy or assessing multiple relocation options, the model scales with your need.

Use Cases

We’ve seen the tool used in several real-world settings:

• Selecting a city for a new GCC or offshore hub

• Evaluating re-entry into the Indian market

• Comparing cities ahead of a consolidation or cost-efficiency project

• Supporting internal decision-making with objective data

• Validating or refuting internal assumptions with live market indicators
  
  

In a job market that shifts quarter to quarter, especially in sectors like tech and finance, context is critical. For teams asking how is the job market in India or what the demand for talent looks like in emerging corridors, this tool gives measurable answers.

How to Get Access

The Business Location Advisory Tool is currently available for enterprise teams through early access. Activation requires a short onboarding to align the tool with your operating context and priority models.

Request early access by writing to rohan@altre.co.in