Track2Realty: In marked contrast to other cities, the dynamics of luxury housing in Mumbai have changed dramatically over the last decade. Delhi, Kolkata and Chennai continue to have location-specific premiums, which have risen consistently.
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: Cushman & Wakefield has expanded into Malaysia with a new office in Kuala Lumpur that is C&W’s 35th office in Asia Pacific.
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 Exclusive: It was in the July last year that Rohit Arora, an NRI returned from New Jersey to settle in Mumbai and set up his consultancy business over here. Looking for an office space, he was so carried by the reports of a price correction that he preferred to defer the office acquisition, either on rent or purchase.
Track2Realty Exclusive: The real estate sector in India today is developing at a scorching pace. Factors such as higher levels of income and purchasing power and the growing need for entertainment, leisure and shopping, the government’s focus on infrastructure development, rapid urbanisation driven by rural-urban immigration and an emerging trend of nuclear families, greater availability of loans to finance real estate purchases, amongst others, have been instrumental in this development.
Track2Realty: Several years after New Delhi, the country’s political capital, witnessed a transformation with the implementation of the Delhi Metro, the financial capital of Mumbai is set to experience a similar phenomenon with the imminent commissioning of the Versova Andheri-Ghatkopar (VAG) corridor of the Mumbai Metro. With equity participation from Reliance Infra and Veolia (a French transportation major), this PPP initiative has all the hallmarks of a game-changer for the city’s transportation and realty landscape.
Track2Realty Exclusive: Investment in real estate has been a widely debated topic, dissected in great detail. For the past few years, India has been shining, has been one of the preferred destinations for real estate investments and has attracted capital infusion from foreign institutional investors/foreign funds as well as domestic players, both institutional and retail investors.