Now at the year end it is time we conceptualized the idea of a compendium of yearly handbook that could serve as a ready reckoner to the sector, the media, HNIs and the investors who have keen interest in the Indian realty market.
Track2Realty, the e newspaper on Indian real estate has launched India’s first real estate yearly handbook, Focus 2012.
In the wake of the unprofessional and unethical behavior of the real estate consultancy Jones Lang LaSalle India (JLLI), the editorial team of Track2Realty has taken a decision to boycott the firm for a month starting Monday, December 5.
The RBI and market regulator SEBI have enhanced their vigil on funds coming from Mauritius, suspecting round-tripping or routing of illicit money back through the island nation.
It’s ironic that a sector worth $140 billion that has weathered the market crash twice in the last around a decade and still emerged as the fastest growing contributor to the GDP has not been granted even industry status in India.
On being asked about the vicious cycle of trust deficit in property market, a Dubai RERA member interrupts me. He asserts there is instead a virtuous cycle of trust; something that has goaded nationals of 100 plus countries to invest in the emirates. The reality is that Dubai property market was no different than the Indian real estate till 2008. What changed Dubai property market and where India can learn from emirates is in setting up fast track courts. A Track2Realty report.
It’s not that I don’t stand with the builders where the support is due on principled ground. I can easily recall how in the year 2017 I had to stand by a builder who was being harassed by the powerful CEO of a powerful development body. The bureaucrat had demanded one apartment, and denial led to bulldozing over the project boundary walls much after grant of OC & CC. As a journalist, I was with the builder for a sting operation and also sent him to a couple of TV news channels to air his grievances. The officer’s troll army had a field day against me, but I stood my ground till the bureaucrat was transferred. Will an anti-builder journalist do that?
Evaluation of the real estate brands has never been as challenging in India as it is now. After all, the large & listed real estate developers across the country are exhibiting identical patterns with their performance. Nearly all of them are witness to their best-ever fiscal topline as well as stock performance. The combined market share, fiscal performance and market cap of some 20-0dd listed real estate companies would be more than half the revenue of Indian real estate.
Call it influence peddling of the real estate stakeholders, or a thought-process that is culturally ingrained in the minds of the Indians, but the collective consciousness is made to believe that real estate investments are insulated against losses. Track2Realty questions the rationale. Real estate as an asset class has been oversold with the promise that you can never suffer losses with a physical asset, unlike stocks and mutual funds where an investor can suffer huge losses. To top it all, there is a general belief that real estate offers the best Return on Investment (ROI).
Some of the English dailies had come up with marvellous marketing idea, as they called it then, of barter deals which they thought was a win-win for both the media houses as well as the builders. They got into a barter deal where builder got crores of advertising space with the publication without a single rupee exchanging hands. In such deals, the media houses instead of advertising revenue got that much exchange value of property in the upcoming projects of these builders. Property supplements were launched by the mainline newspapers that violated all ethics of journalism to glorify the builders and their projects. Such was the clout of these builders that they even interfered in the editorial policies of these newspapers. They felt empowered & free to label the news copy and the journalists as negative, if they didn’t like a news item.