Beyond what is happening in the strategic board room meetings of realty companies, market is cautiously optimistic that with the inventories piling up, developers will sooner or later be forced to blink. A look at the recent developments in the sector does indicate that prices can come down, but it all depends on the builders holding power.
The real estate sector accounted for a sizeable proportion of total investment, as of December 2011, in seven of the top 20 States, an Assocham study said on Monday, July 16.
Growth in the property business in Asia Pacific this year will be driven by many countries and not just China as in the recent past, according to DTZ survey. The region’s solid performance will be supported by strong growth in the use of equity for investment as opposed to debt, intra-regional investment, and increasing willingness of banks to lend, the company says in its research report Money into Property 2012.
Lanco Infratech Ltd, the power producer, is reportedly seeking buyers for a real estate business it values at 27 billion rupees ($483 million). According to the sources close to the development the company has asked investment banks to submit proposals to manage the sale.
The annual monsoons have always been perceived both as a rural blessing and an urban curse – they are good news for the agrarian sector and the bane of water-logging prone cities. However, this caricatured mind-set is breaking.
More than 30% of retail mall space against the projected supply for the first half of the year were deferred, says Cushman & Wakefield report on the retail real estate market. A fresh mall supply for H1 2012 stood at 2.27 million sq. ft. (msf). Approximately one million sq.ft. of expected mall supply was deferred to second half of the year or next year. The overall vacancy rate for the major cities as of H1 2012 stood at 19.6% marginally higher than the previous quarter.
During the boom, many developers dreamed of transforming the urban landscape with millions of square feet of homes, offices and malls and set off on an aggressive expansion financed with debt that at 6 percent interest was cheap by Indian standards.
Realty sector may appear to be bullish and project that downside is over with rosy forecast ahead, yet the decline in fortune is far from being over. As a matter of fact, the learning in the last four years has made most of the leading players to restructure their project portfolio and shed the flab.
Does it reflect a disconnect in the luxury housing where demand of high-end units is 16% but supply is as high as 80%? “Not Really.” says Anmol Haval DGM, Sales & Marketing of City Corporation Limited (CCL) which has launched ‘Sweet Water Villas’, an exclusive project of limited edition villas at ‘Amanora’, the first integrated township being developed under the special township policy of Government of Maharashtra.
It is a latter-day fact that project development on the outskirts of Indian metros begins before the necessary infrastructure has been put down. This happens because demand for developed spaces in cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai is high enough to make even hastily established projects financially feasible for developers.