The Fitch Ratings 2011 outlook for the Indian real estate sector seems to contradict itself. While it says the realty market is stable in the year, it also warns of a negative bias. The negative forecast of Fitch Ratings is, however, based more on the sentiments than the emerging market reality.
Pune is virtually unrecognizable from the sleepy, laid-back city it was a few decades ago. There were no signs of any significant real estate action in the erstwhile Punyanagari before that. Today, however, Pune numbers in the Top Seven property hotspots within the country.
If 2008 was the year of shock, 2009 the year of discovery & introspection and 2010 the follow-up experiment; the year 2011 promises to be the year of comfort level for the Indian real estate sector. It seems the turmoil of the last couple of years has made everybody come out intelligent–investors, developers, bankers and end users.
8 out of every ten home buyers in the Indian cities are sulking with the unfair trade practices of the real estate developers. Only 20 per cent of the buyers said they received a defect-free home and timely possession. The low customer satisfaction index was as much evident with developers offering affordable housing as with luxury housing.
Demand for mid-segment residential units in Mumbai is far greater than available and future supply, therefore growth is expected in 2011. In the industrial sector, cities such as Ahmedabad, Vadodara and other port cities in Gujarat are seeing the highest growth.
Global property consultant Jones Lang LaSalle has cautioned that housing prices in Delhi-NCR and Mumbai have reached the peak level of 2008 and any further rise in the rates will adversely affect the demand. It said the prices in the rest of the country may firm up by about 10-15% next year to touch the 2008 level.
Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee has urged the real estate sector to be sensitive to the purchasing power of the poor while pricing their housing units. Speaking at the 10th national convention of the Confederation of Real Estate developers” Association of India (CREDAI) in New Delhi on Dec 16, Mukherjee also called for greater integrity in development, construction and marketing or real estate business.
After one and a half years of gradual consolidation, real estate in India has fathomed its own comfortable ground, and is poised at the right threshold to take a giant leap in years to come, according to the forecast of the Jones Lang LaSalle, the global real estate services firm.
Mumbai is the financial capital of the country. While it is still a far cry from being comparable to Shanghai in terms of aesthetics and infrastructure, the fact remains that most large corporations and financial institutions have their presence in this city.
Kolkata is fundamentally a Tier II city, and its real estate market is not as volatile as those of the primary cities. Because of this, Kolkata’s residential property sector was not as seriously impacted by the nationwide slump in the real estate market as cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Pune or Hyderabad.