Infrastructure
The Mohali IT City–Kurali Expressway will redraw Tricity real estate. Here is what investors should watch.
A six-lane greenfield corridor is collapsing 45 minutes off Tricity travel time. The land it touches will not price the same way again.
“Infrastructure precedes value. Always.”
Every meaningful real estate cycle in North India has begun with a road. The Delhi–Gurgaon Expressway rewrote NCR. The Yamuna Expressway minted a new investor class. In the Tricity, that road is now the Mohali IT City–Kurali six-lane greenfield expressway, and most of the market has not yet repriced what it means.
I have spent the past decade watching capital chase connectivity in this region. The pattern is unforgiving: land that sits within a 20-minute drive of a high-capacity arterial does not stay affordable. It only stays unnoticed until it is not.
What the corridor actually changes
The expressway shortens the Mohali IT City to Kurali drive by close to 45 minutes, depending on entry point. That is not a commute improvement. That is a redefinition of which postal codes count as part of the working Tricity.
Kurali, Kharar, parts of Lalru and the upper Mullanpur belt move from being treated as outskirts to being treated as North Mohali. That single mental shift is what triggers the price re-rating, not the road itself.
Why this corridor is structurally different
Most road-led corridors in the Tricity have grown organically around an existing settlement. This one is greenfield, six-laned, and engineered for freight and passenger throughput in parallel. It is closer in DNA to a Bharatmala arterial than to a city ring road.
When a corridor is purpose-built for logistics and lifestyle simultaneously, it pulls two demand pools at once: warehousing and last-mile fulfilment hubs on one side, and aspirational mid-segment housing on the other. Land between those two demand poles is what compounds.
The window investors usually miss
There is a predictable phase between the announcement of a corridor and its full operationalisation where prices move in two visible jumps and one invisible one. The invisible jump is the most important. It happens when end-users, not investors, start treating the corridor as their primary commute. That is when rental absorption stiffens and resale liquidity deepens.
We are entering that phase now. The smart money is no longer buying the announcement. It is buying the absorption.
How we are positioning at KBP
Our thesis at KBP Group has been consistent: build affordable luxury townships at the inflection point of corridor maturity, not after it. KBP Smart City Mohali sits inside the absorption catchment of this expressway, not on its speculative edge.
The investor question is no longer whether the Tricity grows northward. It is whether you own the right plot of that growth before the corridor finishes its second jump.
Written by
Gaurav Kansal
Director, KBP Group. Real estate developer and investor focused on affordable luxury townships and infrastructure-led growth corridors across the Tricity region.
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