Globally it is an established fact that the monsoon season is the best time to evaluate a given house. The rainy season offers the home buyers an insight to the property that they wish to purchase. But in India the ground realities are very different. Track2Realty explores the reasons & rationale.
It is much easier to evaluate the seepage, and other wear & tear during the rainy season that exposes the property. There could be no better time to evaluate the quality issues and flaws like leakage & dampness than the monsoons. Property transactions hence get a lease of life during the rains in many parts of the world.
Conceptually the ground realities are no different in India, where it is much easier to predict the monsoons, unlike some other countries where the spells of monsoon are irregular. Furthermore, in an infrastructure deficit country like India, the torrent rains also exposes the flooding and water logging around the project. Still, the rainy season in India from June to September is generally a drought season for the property transactions.
This defies the conventional wisdom of property acquisition when the demand is low and the buyer’s room for negotiation should hence be high. But then home buying is so sentiment driven that the economic rationale of demand & supply and logistical issues may not always play the lead role.
There are multiple factors why the home sales in monsoons are subdued. One obvious reason is that the Indians traditionally don’t make any high value purchases after Akshay Tirtiya and before Ganesh Chaturthi. Since a home is the most emotional & aspirational product; is life’s biggest purchase; and is in most of the case for the lifetime; the Indians prefer to wait till the beginning of the festive season. Inauspicious period of Shraddh and Pitripaksh also falls during the monsoon season, where the traditional belief is that any new purchase will invite the curse of the ancestors.
Secondly, the developers too are self-conscious to not get their projects over exposed during the season. The twin realities of the project & surrounding infrastructure getting exposed to the monsoon showers, refrain them from any tangible marketing offers to tempt the home buyers during the said period. The home listing gets slow with even slower buyer response across the secondary market transactions as well. Wear & tear with the old building is even more challenging to conceal during the rains.
No home buyer would be excited to commit to the purchase after visiting a housing project where the construction speed is either too slow or at standstill due to rains. Even the availability of construction workers is a challenge for most of the developers and construction firms during the monsoons as many of these migrant labourers leave for their villages in the ripe season of agriculture.
No one would officially admit it, but privately many developers maintain that the client conversion rate out of the footfalls on sites is least during the monsoons. Part of the problem lies with the fact that the project sites and the connectivity (both infrastructure & traffic bottlenecks) looks messy during the rains. For the buyers also it is never a prudent idea to go on house hunt with the family during the monsoon season when the potholes, water logging & traffic bottlenecks are a challenge to deal with.
Moreover, since the concept of Shubh Muhurat and inauspicious days is also on top of the mind of the vast universe of the Indian developers, the market is not witness to any new project launches during this lean period. It is not that the developers in this part of the world are en bloc discouraging the home buyers. Developers with ready to move inventory are also offering the Monsoon Discounts in some exceptional cases.
But these are aberrations of a handful of developers sitting over piles of unsold ready to move inventory and hence reeling under the debt burden. Moreover, the newly constructed ready to move property does not have as much seepage & dampness challenges to deal with as the under construction and/or the resale properties.
Furthermore, across the Indian job market, the bonus and rewards are announced at the time of the festive season. For an average salaried class home buyer, who has to shell out 15-20 per cent of the project cost upfront and get the rest financed, it is a psychological relief to commit at a time when the cash reward reaches the hands.
There are logistical issues at hand as well. Most of the young home buyers prefer to buy houses near to the schools of the children. By April, generally the school admission is over. Most of the home buyers, especially when going out for a ready to move property avoid the mid-session of children’s school. It is far more convenient to buy the property during the year-end festive season and move into the new house with simultaneous shifting of schools for the children.
This also raises a fundamental question as to whether there is a bias in the perception across the different geographies of India. While the concept of festive buying is a pan-India phenomenon, it is generally noticed that the young expat professionals are less likely to be carried away with the auspicious Muhurats than the local communities across the Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Mumbai, Pune, Kolkata and the NCR regions.
So, it is a case of both the demand & supply having their own reasons to not get into aggressive buying or selling of property during the monsoons. Call it a case of belief over logic but this is the way Indian buying patterns get channelized across the high value transactions and the life’s costliest purchase is no different.
Ravi Sinha
@ravitrack2media
Track2Realty is an independent media group managed by a consortium of journalists. Starting as the first e-newspaper in the Indian real estate sector in 2011, the group has today evolved as a think-tank on the sector with specialized research reports and rating & ranking. We are editorially independent and free from commercial bias and/or influenced by investors or shareholders. Our editorial team has no clash of interest in practicing high quality journalism that is free, frank & fearless.
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