M3M Capital Financial Centre resale

CFC stands for Capital Financial Centre. M3M lists it as an office project in Sector 113, Gurugram, with frontage on the Dwarka Expressway, inside its Smart City Delhi Airport master development. Buyers and agents almost always call it M3M CFC, so both names point at the same building.

It is listed by M3M as ongoing. Nothing has been handed over, which means every resale here is the transfer of somebody's booking, and the building you are buying into does not yet exist to be inspected.

What is actually being sold

Office buildings are sold in ways that flats are not, and the words matter:

• Lockable office — a defined, physically separable unit with its own door, which you can let to a tenant on its own.
• Bare shell — walls, floor and services brought to the unit, with everything else at your cost.
• Warm shell or fitted — some or most of the fit-out already done, which is a materially different price.
• Retail or multiplex space in the same tower, which is a different asset from an office and lets to a different kind of tenant.

Press coverage at launch described a mix of lockable offices, retail units and multiplex space in this tower. Do not assume which of them your seller holds. The allotment letter and the payment plan say what it is, at what size, in what condition on handover, and those are the documents to read before price is discussed.

Resale before completion is a builder transfer

Because the building is not finished, a resale is an assignment of the original allottee's booking rather than a sale of property. In practice:

• The developer has to consent, and charges a transfer fee for consenting.
• Nothing is registered yet, so there is no stamp duty at this stage. It arrives later, at conveyance.
• The payment position transfers with the unit — everything paid, and everything still due on the schedule.
• GST treats an under-construction commercial purchase differently from a completed one. Get the rate, the base it is charged on and who bears it confirmed in writing before you agree a number. On a commercial unit this is not a small line.

Ask for the demand letters raised so far and the receipts against them, and read the ledger rather than the seller's summary. Interest on late payments follows the unit to you.

Completion here is years out on the developer's own timeline. That means the real cost of the purchase includes carrying it — instalments, GST, and no rent — for the whole period between now and handover. Work that out before you negotiate.

Strata ownership is the risk nobody prices

This is the most important thing on the page and it is almost never discussed at the point of sale.

A building where every floor is owned by one landlord leases to corporate tenants as a whole. A building carved into hundreds of small strata units, each with a different owner, does not. Large occupiers want a single lease, a single landlord and control of the common areas, and a strata building cannot easily offer any of it. Gurugram has more than one Grade A tower where the construction is genuinely good and the leasing never worked for exactly this reason.

So before you buy a small unit in a large office tower, ask:

• How many units is the building divided into, and how small is the smallest?
• Who leases it — the developer under a pooled arrangement, or each owner individually?
• Is there a facility management structure with real authority over the common areas?
• What does the maintenance charge come to per sq ft, and what does it cover?

If someone offers you an assured return or a guaranteed rent on an office unit, ask which clause of the agreement creates it and which company is liable. If the clause does not exist, the return does not exist.

What decides one unit's price against another's

In an office tower the spread between two units of the same area is driven by things a floor plan does not show:

• Floor level and aspect. Higher floors and open outlooks lease faster and hold rent better.
• Efficiency. The ratio of usable to chargeable area varies unit to unit, and you pay for chargeable area but let usable area.
• Car parking. Office parking allocations are frequently priced and transferred separately from the unit, and a unit short of parking is much harder to let. Confirm the allocation in writing.
• Frontage and access for a retail or food-and-beverage unit at podium level, which is a different valuation exercise altogether.
• The payment stage. A booking that is 20 per cent paid and one that is 70 per cent paid are not comparable prices, whatever the per-sq-ft figure says.

We price a unit here against what comparable units have genuinely transacted at and against the payment stage attached to it. Where we do not hold the number, we say so and go and find it rather than filling the gap. If anything on this page is wrong, tell us and it is corrected or removed the same day.