How Neetish Sarda Built India's Largest Managed Office Platform

What began as a contrarian idea in a market dominated by conventional leasing and coworking spaces is now India’s leading managed office powerhouse, driven by Neetish Sarda’s foresight.

A decade ago, India’s office market was still built for a slower era. Enterprises were spread thin across multiple buildings, battling long leases, inconsistent service levels, and infrastructure that simply couldn’t keep up. The idea that entire office campuses could be leased, designed, delivered, and operated end-to-end for large companies with speed and consistency felt distant.

This was the whitespace Neetish Sarda stepped into. Then in his twenties, he saw what many in India’s commercial real-estate sector did not: enterprises needed more than seats and floors. They needed flexibility without the chaos of traditional office spaces, integrated amenities without the fragmentation of coworking spaces, and campus-scale efficiencies without the burden of upfront capital.

That conviction grew into Smartworks, today India’s largest managed office platform with a footprint spanning 14 million sq. ft. across 14 cities and serving over 760 enterprise clients.

The early insight that changed everything

After returning to India from abroad, Neetish Sarda observed a simple pattern. India’s talent story was scaling. India’s enterprise ambitions were scaling. But India’s workplaces were not. Companies expanding at record speed were trapped in slow-moving real estate cycles, multi-year lock-ins, heavy capex demands, and scattered facilities that made culture and collaboration harder.

Sarda believed the office should act like an infrastructure backbone, not a bottleneck. Workspaces, in his view, needed to be plug-and-play extensions of an organisation, capable of scaling at the same pace the business did. And just as importantly, he felt the modern workplace experience, something he had seen at global tech campuses during his time abroad, was missing entirely in India.

This clarity became the foundation of the Smartworks model.

Creating a category before the category existed

While many operators were building coworking spaces for freelancers and startups, Neetish Sarda went the opposite way. He focused on India’s real engine of demand- large enterprises and GCCs, and built a model tailored for them.

Smartworks pioneered the managed campus approach: taking over entire buildings or 500,000–800,000 sq. ft. developments and converting them into amenity-rich, tech-enabled, fully serviced campuses. It was a bold move, far removed from the seat-selling model that defined most flex spaces at the time.

The strategy paid off.

Today, Smartworks has six campuses of over half a million sq. ft. each including Eastbridge in Mumbai, an 815,000 sq. ft. development that now stands as the world’s largest managed office campus. It is the clearest validation of Sarda’s vision - scale, delivered fast and with institutional consistency, would become the backbone of enterprise workspace expansion in India.

A platform, not a real-estate play

A key reason Smartworks scaled faster than its peers is Sarda’s platform-first mindset. Instead of behaving like a landlord or a coworking brand, Smartworks acts like an ecosystem integrator.

Under one service stack, it connects developers, vendors, enterprises, and employees- enabling everything from collaboration zones and cafeterias to wellness rooms, recreation spaces, retail touchpoints, and enterprise-grade technology. The experience layer became Smartworks’ strongest differentiator as companies moved from simple office requirements to campus-style environments that supported culture, collaboration, and productivity.

Winning the enterprise and GCC market

Smartworks’ numbers tell the story.
Nearly 90% of its rental revenue comes from enterprise and GCC clients.
The 1,000+ seat cohort has grown from 12% to 35% in just three years.
More than 30% of revenue now comes from multi-city clients.

Its pre-commitment model is equally strong, with new campuses often filling 30–35% occupancy before launch. As India’s GCC expansion accelerates, Smartworks sits at the intersection of demand for scale, speed, and compliance-ready campuses.

Disciplined growth in a complex sector

What sets Neetish Sarda apart is not just foresight but financial discipline. Smartworks operates with one of the lowest capex structures in the industry (~₹1,350 per sq. ft.), delivers annuity-like cash flows, and maintains a net-debt-negative position- rare for a fast-scaling real estate platform.

This focus on sustainability, not just speed, allowed the company to list on the public markets in 2025- a milestone that reinforced its credibility with enterprises, developers, and investors alike.

A new architecture for India’s office future

Today, Smartworks is more than a workspace provider. It is an infrastructure platform powering India’s next phase of enterprise and GCC growth. The company has launched SmartVantage, its own offering for GCCs. By betting early on the managed campus model, Neetish Sarda didn’t just build India’s largest managed office brand, he rewrote the rules of the industry itself.

In doing so, he has become one of the most influential architects of India’s workspace revolution, shaping how the country’s most ambitious companies will work, collaborate, and scale for years to come.