Track2Realty: In India’s competitive real estate market, luxury housing projects have been launched aplenty over the last couple of years. So much so that a conservative market like Chennai, for instance, is likely to witness about 1,500 units of ultra-luxury homes—budgeted between Rs. 5–20 crore—within the next 12 months.
Track2Realty: Expectations of an economic turnaround were belied with GDP growth slowing down to about 4.7% for FY 2013–14, marking it as the second straight year with below-5% growth.
Track2Realty: For the quarter ended March 2014, nearly US$800 million was invested into India’s real estate sector. This translates to almost Rs.4,800 crore having been injected into the sector through the private equity route over the past few months. This couldn’t have happened at a more opportune timefor a sector faced with a liquidity crunch, high land acquisition costs, and stringent due diligence from the banking sector—which continues to perceive real estate as a high-risk domain in India.
Track2Realty Exclusive: India has traditionally been a reluctant urbaniser and the developers have been even more reluctant to take the roads less travelled. For long it is the government agencies that have been catalyst to land acquisition and hand it over to the developers. Now that the Land Acquisition Bill is set to change the entire ballgame, Track2Realty wonders whether it is time to take a few case studies where a developer has dared to opt for ‘Destination Development’. Though such cases have been few and far between, the road ahead indicates even lesser first movers in the ring.
Track2Realty: The emerging cities continue to dominate the rental growth in the region with Jakarta (Indonesia) witnessing the highest office rental growth (yoy) among 33 cities in Asia, followed by Manila (Philippines) at 2nd position and Shenzhen (China) at 3rd Pune (India) at 4th position while NCR (India) ranked at 10, says Asia Office Q1 2014 report of Cushman & Wakefield.
Track2Realty: Despite more than 60% of global retailers already having a presence in India, the lack of quality retail space and legislative issues have been an impediment to the spread of organized retail in the country, according to CBRE’s report, Expanding Horizons of Global Retailers in India.
Track2Realty: As consumers continued to face inflation and high interest rates in April, average household spending seemed unlikely to recover in the near term. Subdued market sentiments looked likely to continue unless consumer confidence began to rise.
Track2Realty: Sustainable and inclusive urban development is of particular importance at this juncture of our economic growth. With the urban infrastructure of our major metropolitan cities bursting at the seams from increasing urban migratory patterns—which is only set to accelerate in years to come—the development of new integrated cities has become the need of the hour.
Track2Realty: Total inflows in the real estate sector for the first quarter of 2014 were recorded at INR 2,800 crores (USD 460 million), witnessing an increase of 28% compared to the previous quarter and nearly 2.5 times the investment in Q1 2013, says Cushman & Wakefield’s report on private equity (PE) investments in real estate.
Track2Realty: Investment-grade office space demand slowed down in the first quarter of 2014, with around 6.3 million sq. ft. of Grade A office space getting absorbed across the leading cities of the country. Transaction activity was dominated by the National Capital Region (NCR), Bangalore and Chennai.