Trinity Partners (TP) achieved an important milestone in October 2020, of having completed 10 years in the real estate consulting business. It was on October 1, 2010, that Vijay Sarathi and myself set out on this adventure as co-founders. We have seen many ups and downs making this journey totally worth it. Idea of writing this piece is to share our experiences with some of you who might be interested to start their own brokering enterprises.

In some sense Trinity is the result of an exercise which was necessitated by the last recession i.e. better and effective use of available resources especially opex. In 2009-10 with recession and political disturbances at a peak in our city, both of us had been looking at ways of reducing our respective opex. Nobody had a clue of

when the market would eventually stabilise for which political stability was a pre-condition.

We individually operated Hrdya Property (Vijay) and ASA Management till 2010 and both these companies were successful. In 2010 ASA had completed a 40Ksft leasing deal of DQE with DLF SEZ and completed the sale deal of 1.65Lsft Jayabheri Infobhan Towers with Alexandria. This building later on became CARE Hospital, Gachibowli. By 2010, Hrdya had done over a dozen stores for brands like Jack Jones, UCB, Park Avenue, Adidas etc. and completed a 50Ksft leasing deal of Anthelio with DLF SEZ. In cricket it is generally thought that one should retire at the peak of their performance. In business, one should plan the next phase of operations when one is in good position, because business cycles will keep going up or down depending on circumstances out of our control.

In 2009-10 period, due to our joint involvement with the local brokers association, we started spending a lot of time together. This helped us in understanding each other better, exchanging thoughts, discussing business strategies & client handling and eventually build mutual trust & faith. We also started exchanging a lot of business information and I ended up spending a lot of time in Vijay's office. Somewhere in the beginning of 2010 we started discussing about operating from one office so that we could mutually save on opex. It then sounded like the most logical thing to do having the same reception, same office, same office boy, same listing boys etc. with our own independent sections in a common premises. Luckily we had different business interests, ASA was more focused on residential and office space and Hrdya was focused on retail, investments and land. We decided to evaluate this idea seriously.

Our involvement with the association also showed us, that the days of the single broker entity were numbered. Members who were sole proprietorships regularly join the association, and without any specific reason vanish from the association. This model has many weakness but most important is lack of management bandwidth and lack of pan-India operations which limit their client attractiveness. For those who know the history of brokering in India most international competitors started coming in around 20-25 years back. All of them started concentrating on the office sector and thereafter moved to the other sectors. The local broker ceded market ground to them by moving into sectors in which multinational players had no current interest. Eventually they ceded all market segments. Management bandwidth is required to counter this ever changing competitive scenario. Most importantly the business has to be client focussed where they benefit from the management bandwidth and geographical spread, failing which business does not last long in this market. These above 2 factors eventually motivated us to merge our businesses and form Trinity Partners.

Our joint evaluation took about 6 months, in which even our respective family members also joined in and helped with the decision. We had several meetings or preparatory discussions to evaluate all possible pros and cons. This was the most important decision of our professional careers and hence buy-in of our families was paramount. Still remember our final meeting at Chilli's A.S.Rao Nagar for which our kids also joined. My son Adrian, who was about 4years old then, would not enter the restaurant seeing the giant chilli symbol. We cajoled him to enter and I think just to get rid of the spicy food he quickly nodded in agreement when asked if we should work together. Not sure he understood what was happening then but even his concurrence was also taken. We evaluated a lot of names and finally decided on the name Trinity Partners suggested by my wife, Suja.

Trinity Parters started operations on October 1, 2010 with a nice office setup in Secunderabad (Vijay's old office) and a good team size. In the last decade we have seen 2 business phases for Trinity, the first 5-6 years was the jack-of-all-trades phase and the next 3-4 years was the specialisation phase. Since Trinity was born in the middle of one of the worst recessions that Hyderabad market had seen we initially decided to work on all segments. Some of the segments which we worked on and our first deals were as follows:

• Office Space: Our first deal was a 42000sft deal for Oakton at Jubilee Hills Road No. 36. This company has since been taken over by NTT.
• Retail: Our first deal was for Gautier a MNC furniture company.
• Residential: We sold our first few units at Jayabheri Orange County and Ramky Towers.
• Joint venture (JV): We did our first JV deal at Jayabheri Pine Valley was for a 600 sq yds plot and the building developed is now known as Gardenia Mabuhay.
• Biotech Land: We did few land transactions in MN Park (then known as Alexandria Knowledge Park) in both phases. Clients included Sanzyme, Sandor and Unicorn.
• Residential Plots: We have sold about 10 plots in Banyan Tree Retreat. Our clients have benefited from the tremendous value creation here.
• Warehousing: Our first deal was with Heinz for a small warehouse in Nacharam.
• Investment: We did a few investment deals in The Platina, Gachibowli.
• Asset Management: We managed a portfolio of approx. 125 properties for Brand Estate (Times of India group company) which helped open up our horizon to a large number of developers and their projects.
• Landlord representation: Our first assignment was marketing space was for Birla Research Centre (Inside the Birla Planetarium development) part of the C.P. Birla group

Our first phase continued till 2015-16 and thereafter once the market conditions improved it helped Trinity get into the next phase of specialisation. Here we specialised only on certain verticals like office space, retail and investment.

We have been fortunate enough to work with clients like Genpact, L&T Infotech, TTEC, TDCX, Genesys (earlier ININ), ZF India, Tech Mahindra, Concentrix, Xiaomi, Shore Infotech, Dr. Reddy's, Orient Group, Signode, Geometric Software, Awfis, Oyo, 91springboard etc., and many more esteemed clients. With clients like ZF India, ININ, TTEC, TDCX etc. we got the opportunity to serve them when they started India operations from Hyderabad. On the retail side we started with mall marketing with our first assignment being delivered for the Phoenix Group for their upcoming mall at Guntur. This assignment has given us an opportunity to interact and close deals with major brands.

The lockdown has ensured that a new phase would start for Trinity Partners.Our earlier 2 phases are now well and truly over. New strategies and plans would have to be figured out to ride the maze of the post covid business scenario. We would have to be even more client focused to ensure better and more work in the future. Lockdown has been hard for all of us and in our case our entire pipeline got wiped out by March end. Some of our clients who have since become close friends helped us come out of this dark period. Their support and motivation helped us close a number of transactions during the lockdown and subsequently as well. We remain indebted to our clients for their unstinting support.

In terms of improving our pan-India reach we have worked on a lot of ideas and failed at most until we figured out CIRIL. In 2010 we started working with known associates in other cities for our client requirements. Whenever we had to introduce a client it would be with Broker A in one city and Broker B in second city and Broker C in a third city. This model of multiple brands itself is self-defeating since the client never identifies with one uniform brand. In 2013 we became members of NAI Global to explore if a MNC tag will help us cover our pan-India coverage. We travelled internationally for business development in South East Asia and to the US for global meetings. We realised that such networks have limited visibility or plan for expanding across India or Asia. Since the network did not expand we were left handicapped, hence we came out of this arrangement in early 2015.

It is around this time that we alongwith our friend Sanjay Puri, started toying with the idea of creating CIRIL. We wanted to create a company, made in India, for Indian brokering firms, tailor-made to Indian market conditions. Still fondly remember, our first exploratory meeting held at Novotel Hyderabad Airport where we called 9 leading broking firms from across India to evaluate setting up a full service real estate consulting company which could become a benchmark in India. The idea finally matured into creating a pan-India real estate company which would have members in all major cities. Members would be market leaders in their cities, have extensive experience, good team strength and great reputation & contacts in their local markets. The members would be business owners and not branch heads. Their only weakness, pre-CIRIL, would be not having a pan-India reach. It took us couple of years to get together like minded members and standardise all processes and systems. We wanted to create a company which would operate with branches all over the country. Strength of CIRIL would be business development and experience.

CIRIL has become just that and its reliance on technology ensures that all systems work seamlessly. Information is key to the business of real estate consulting and CIRIL members have the trust and faith in the system to share leads, information and experience in a free flowing manner. This open system has helped CIRIL members close over 150+ deals spanning more that 5.5mn sft across all verticals. CIRIL members have shown exceptional performance during lockdown closing some landmark deals in Pune, Kolkata and Ahmedabad. CIRIL has a small team of employees on its payrolls and it is a matter of pride that CIRIL is an all-women team who are taking it to new heights and goals. It is indeed gratifying to see the CIRIL idea now being explored by others as well.

Clients have appreciated and benefitted from the management bandwidth and depth of experience of over 45 years created between the co-founders of Trinity, possibly the sole reason for our high rate repeat business. Our pan-India reach has added to our client attractiveness over the past decade. We are sure we will have to keep experimenting and evolving as times demand as change is the only constant for all of us. We are particularly proud of the fact that we never had to face a dissatisfied client or landlord in our career. Everything is dealt with transparency and hard work as though it is our own money involved.

Some unwritten rules which we have always followed at Trinity Partners are as follows:

• Our work philosophy has been that with 2 of us everything should be twofold in terms of meetings, deals, efforts etc. We have to work smart and effectively with the common goal in mind.
• Run the company as a proper organisation with cash flows planned for couple of quarters. Biggest mistake brokers make is running their organisations deal to deal.
Long term view requires one to run like a proper company with employees and regular opex planned for in advance.
• The business has to be always profitable and liquid. There is no scope for cash burn or time burn or effort burn.
• We are always open to new ideas and keep evaluating the same. We might take a call to drop it but it would be an informed call.
• Fortunately for us we both came off from long professional careers. Vijay is an ex-Mahindra Group employee and I have worked in real estate consulting companies like Insignia and IPM&SL. A great test of whether one can be an entrepreneur could be a person's professional career. If one has handled some else's money properly as a branch / business head, earned money, increased revenues and delivered profits consistently post taxes then one has possibly cleared the first step to being an entrepreneur in our field.
• Always strive to have an impeccable reputation and market standing. This is not something one can automatically do but has to be worked upon daily and with each deal. It takes years to build a reputation and a moment to ruin it.
• Future needs to be planned and worked upon diligently. Be as realistic as much as possible in your planning and execution.
• When one starts business the easiest thing to do is spend one's money on getting a fancy office, furniture, visiting card etc. Rather work on only the difficult things i.e. obtaining clients and closing deals.

We at Trinity Partners remain thankful to our clients, employees (including ex-employees), associates, CIRIL, well-wishers, friends, landlords, developers, builders, building managers / supervisors and even the numerous security guards who might be normally our first point of contact. Trinity Partners has been able to complete a decade only because of the support and encouragement from all of the above.

In the end let us try and answer our most asked question i.e. what does the name Trinity mean? It means a lot of things but the simple explanation we like is that for any successful real estate deal 3 things are always required i.e. client who needs space, willing landlord and last but not the least a professional broker like us who will get both of them connected and close the deal. For our successful business coming together of this Trinity of elements is essential hence the name Trinity Partners. We hope you like reading this piece as much as we partners liked reminiscing about our old memories. Hopefully more partners are planning the next Trinity already.