Credence Advisors — Simplifying Realty. Adding Value. Book a strategy session
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Credence · About

Founded Mumbai, 2011 · The Formation

Four people. Sixteen years. Three things we are genuinely good at.

Credence Advisors is a commercial real estate advisory in Ghatkopar, Mumbai. We are small deliberately — the partner who takes your call is the partner who negotiates your deal and reads your documents. There is no handover to someone you have not met.

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The firm

Advisory-led, not transaction-led.

Most firms in this market are organised around the transaction: find a property, close it, move on. We are organised around the requirement, which is a slower business and a more durable one.

It means we spend most of our effort before anyone sees a building — mapping what the client actually needs, including the parts they have not thought about. It means we occasionally tell a client the market will not give them what they want, and that the honest answer is to wait or to change the brief.

It also means we turn work away. Every one of our three service pages says out loud who we are not right for. A four-person firm that takes everything serves nobody properly.

People don’t remember the deal. They remember whether you were honest when your own fee was on the line. Twice we have been ready to forgo ours entirely to get a client the right outcome. Both relationships are still with us, and that is the whole strategy.

2011Founded in Mumbai by Rishi Dedhia and Uday Shah
16Years advising on Mumbai commercial space
4People. That is the constraint, and it is deliberate
8,600+Properties walked, verified and filed in our own databank
3Declared niches — we do not work outside them
~30%Of our business comes through referral networks
The Formation Geese rotate the lead and hold the line. The lead changes; the direction does not.

The partners

Two people, and between them the whole deal.

One of us maps the requirement and negotiates it. The other makes the numbers hold up. Every mandate gets both.

Rishi Dedhia, partner at Credence Advisors

Rishi Dedhia

Partner · Requirement, negotiation, client relationships

Every enquiry starts with me. I map the requirement, tell you honestly whether we are the right firm for it, and only then bring in the team.

I trained as a telecommunications engineer and took an FMBA afterwards. My early career was in computers — including a stretch at Infosys — where I worked out fairly quickly that I liked the people considerably more than the machines. That turned out to be the useful discovery.

In 2009 my uncle pulled me into real estate. It clicked on the first day: the work is listening carefully to what a business actually needs, then knowing the ground well enough to find it. In 2011 Uday and I founded Credence. In 2014 we worked on the Trump project in India. In 2017 came Landmark Worldwide — the deal we still tell, because a global consultancy had held the brief for six months and never understood it.

Sixteen years on, what I do has not really changed. I take the first call, ask the questions nobody has asked, and stay on the file through negotiation and documentation. Outside work I am a car enthusiast and will take any excuse for a long drive.

LinkedIn Email Rishi
Uday Shah, partner at Credence Advisors

Uday Shah

Partner · Retail, office and industrial mandates; deal structure

A certified financial planner by training — which turns out to be the useful qualification here, because every property decision is a financial decision wearing a building.

I run mandates across all three desks. On retail, that means helping brands find the right location, with the right visibility, at the right price — so they can sustain, grow and evolve. That is the work we have done for 3M, Raymond, Toothsi, Noble Medicals and Total Sports. On commercial office, leave-and-licence or outright purchase, for Landmark, Hunter Douglas and redBus among others. On industrial land and warehousing, sourcing the right parcel is genuinely difficult, and that is where the ground knowledge earns its keep — Space Valet, Prafull Foods and GMV Componento.

The clients I most enjoy are the ones expanding deliberately — a brand with five to ten stores looking for its next Mumbai locations, jewellers, doctors, banks. Enough scale to know what they need; small enough that the next decision genuinely matters.

The sequence rarely changes: understand the requirement, put up options that actually answer it, walk the sites, shortlist, negotiate, run the diligence, close. Written down it looks obvious. Almost all of the value sits in doing the first step properly and the diligence honestly.

Most of our work still arrives by referral: existing clients, BNI, people who have watched us close something properly. We have never had to be the loudest firm in the room, and the ethics are not a line for a website — they are the reason the same names keep coming back.

LinkedIn Email Uday

Behind the two of us there are two more colleagues handling research, site coordination and the databank. Four people in total, which is the reason we take a limited number of mandates and the reason the strategy sessions are limited — not a scarcity tactic.

What we believe

Six things we do not re-argue internally.

These are not values on a wall. They decide which mandates we take and which we decline.

Trust is the product. The deal follows.

If a tactic would work but make us sound like brokers, it does not work. The relationship outlasts the transaction by a decade, and it is worth more.

Requirement before options. Always.

Every failure we have been called in to fix traces back to somebody skipping the brief. We start at step one even when the client would rather see buildings.

Specificity is the proof.

“Great outcomes” is nothing. 2.5 times the space at 30% lower outflow within two kilometres is something. Every claim we publish carries a number and a source.

Depth over breadth.

Mumbai mid-market office, Bhiwandi and Ahmedabad warehousing, and pre-leased investment. Three declared niches. If a piece of work does not sit in one of them, we say so.

We decode documents. We do not draft them.

We are not a law firm and will never imply otherwise. What we bring is sixteen years of reading these agreements and knowing which clauses cost money later.

Educate before selling.

The Market Pulse goes out whether or not there is anything to sell that fortnight. The 15% Test names the gaps in your brief without asking for anything first.

An elephant in profile at the water's edge, ear, eye and tusk in view

Where we work

Three geographies, and we say no outside them.

Ground knowledge does not travel. Ours is worth something in these markets and close to nothing elsewhere, so we do not pretend otherwise.

MumbaiMid-market office of 3,000–15,000 sq ft — GCCs, BFSI, IT and ITeS, SMEs — plus retail and MMR industrial
BhiwandiWarehousing land and Grade-A sheds, in the micro-market that takes roughly a third of India’s warehousing leasing
AhmedabadWarehousing and industrial land

Residential is not something we do. Nor is property management. In both cases we would rather introduce you to someone who does it well than do it adequately ourselves.

An eagle soaring against an open sky

The strategy session

Forty-five minutes with Rishi. No pitch.

The same requirement-mapping session our paying clients get at step one. You leave with a written map of your requirement whether or not you work with us.

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