A note from Kumar Naresh — Founder & Principal Advisor, Propblitz
A project launches in Gurgaon. Queues form outside the sales office by dawn. Tokens in crores are collected by evening. By nightfall, the banner is out on every WhatsApp group in the city: SOLD OUT IN SIX HOURS.
And then, three months later, you can still buy a unit in that same project. Quietly. Without a queue. Sometimes at the same price.
Both these things cannot be simultaneously true. So one of them is theatre — professionally produced, carefully staged theatre. And it is worth understanding, plainly and without acrimony, who pays for the ticket.
Let me begin with fairness to the builders, because balance is essential to any argument worth making. From a developer's side, this is rational marketing. You collect expressions of interest for weeks. You concentrate every serious enquiry into a single launch day. You create timed slots, publish photographs of the crowd, let momentum do what momentum does. Scarcity has been the oldest formula in every luxury market on earth, and Gurgaon's developers have perfected its choreography. It is legal. It is legitimate. In a real sense, it is admirable execution.
The question worth asking is not whether the theatre exists. It clearly does. The question is: what does it cost the audience?
The cost to the buyer is the one nobody talks about at the sales gallery.
Think about what actually happens in that queue. A man — often a first-generation industrialist, a senior professional, an NRI who flew in for the launch — is making a five, ten, twenty crore decision. In minutes. Under pressure. With a hundred people behind him, and a salesperson gently urging him toward the units still on the board.
He doesn't get the floor he wanted. He doesn't get the stack he wanted. The corner unit was picked at 10:14 am; the club-facing tower on the south side went at 10:22. By the time he sits down, he has three choices, and none of them are what he came for. So he adjusts his criteria — because leaving empty-handed after two hours in that queue feels worse than compromising. And he signs.
Consider the arithmetic of that decision. A buyer spending twenty crore rupees cannot select his own unit — the single most important decision he will make about that asset for the next decade. Not because inventory doesn't exist. Not because his money isn't good. But because the process has been designed to prevent selection.
The queue's real function, therefore, is not to sell units. It is to transfer negotiating power. In a normal transaction, the buyer holds the diligence — time, comparison, the right to walk away. In a queue, all three are suspended. And urgency, as any seasoned real estate professional will tell you, is the most expensive premium in the market. It just never appears on the price sheet.
There is a second casualty of this ritual, and I want to name it because nobody in the industry does publicly: the industry itself.
Channel partners — brokers who have spent months building trust with a buyer, understanding his family, his budget, his true priorities — bring that buyer to the launch. They stand in the same queue. They register the same interest. And in a significant share of these events, once the launch euphoria peaks and the developer's revenue targets are locked, the treatment of these channel partners shifts. Calls go unreturned. Commitments made verbally are quietly renegotiated. The professional dignity of the introduction dissolves into inventory arithmetic.
Meanwhile, on the buyer's side, a parallel degradation occurs. Ten different brokers have chased the same lead in the pre-launch period. All of them want the deal. In desperation, the conversation slides toward a single word, spoken in nervous WhatsApp messages: cashback. When an advisor's fee itself becomes the currency of the deal, the advice loses its value entirely. The buyer stops receiving guidance and starts receiving discounts. The industry stops being a profession and becomes a marketplace of margin-sharing.
I have spent 15 years in and around Indian real estate. I built BrokersADDA.com with a community of over one lakh forty thousand real estate professionals, and I have watched the culture around launches change year by year. I make this observation not with anger, but with genuine concern: the FOMO machine reliably serves exactly one party — the party operating it.
Now for the balance, because this argument would be dishonest without it.
Some projects do sell genuinely fast, and they deserve to. Real scarcity exists in Gurgaon — a handful of well-located, well-executed, sensibly-priced projects with a limited unit count will always find their buyers quickly, and rightly so. My argument is not against launches. It is not against builders creating momentum around their inventory. It is not against buyers acting decisively when a genuine opportunity arrives.
My argument is far narrower and far more practical.
Never buy because of the queue.
A queue is evidence of demand. It is not evidence of value. A crowd tells you how well a launch was marketed; it does not tell you whether the project deserves your capital. And the corollary is worth stating plainly: if a project is genuinely excellent, it will still be excellent three months from now, when you can walk into the sales office at your leisure and choose the unit you actually want.
If it is not still available three months later — for that unit, at that price — then perhaps it was worth the queue after all. But you will have your answer without needing to make the decision under duress.
A few practical suggestions for buyers approaching a launch this quarter.
Decide your criteria before you enter the building. Which towers, which floor bands, which stacks would you accept? Which would you refuse even at a discount? Write this down. Bring it with you. In the queue, this list is the only barrier between you and a compromised decision.
Set your walk-away price in advance, and separate it emotionally from the effort you have already invested in the queue. Sunk cost fallacies claim more real estate mistakes in India than any other single factor.
Compare the launch inventory against ready or near-ready alternatives at the same ticket size. In Gurgaon today, the same seven or eight crore that enters a new launch could buy a ready trophy resale on Golf Course Road, or an established branded residence, or a curated selection of options across three developers. The launch is a choice, not the only choice.
And ask, quietly and to yourself, one question before you sign anything: would I still want this specific unit if there were no queue outside?
A market where a twenty-crore buyer cannot choose his own unit is not, by any reasonable definition, a hot market. It is a staged one. FOMO is a pricing strategy — an entirely legitimate one, deployed by the parties whose interests it serves. Your patience is the counter-strategy.
The developers will keep running the theatre; that is their right, and in their commercial interest, it is even their duty. Your right, as the buyer whose capital finances the entire performance, is to refuse the script.
I hope this note gives you a slightly clearer view of what is happening on the other side of the sales gallery's velvet rope. It is not intended to malign any developer or any project. It is intended, plainly, to remind Gurgaon's serious buyers that their money is worth more than a queue's theatre — and that a decision made with patience will almost always outlast a decision made in a crowd.
Kumar Naresh is the Founder and Principal Advisor at Propblitz, Gurgaon's mandate-led luxury resale advisory. He is also the founder of BrokersADDA.com and the author of "From Leads to Deals."
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