The head of U.S.-based industrial real estate developer Panattoni has urged India to streamline its land acquisition processes which he said make it difficult for developers to cash in on a warehousing boom in the country.

Foreign and domestic real estate developers are building more warehouses in India to cater to growing storage demand of companies, but land acquisition is often a sticking point in a country where multiple farmers or other people can own a piece of land, and transfer processes are complex and take time.

While India offers opportunities for expansion, “the biggest challenge is land itself – permissions (and) availability of data to acquire land,” said Robert Dobrzycki, CEO of Panattoni, which owns large industrial real estate assets in the U.S., Canada and Europe and entered the Indian market in 2022.

“We would like to do more and more. We would like to maximize the presence. But we are usually limited by external factors” like land availability, Dobrzycki said.