Global hotel chain Hilton Worldwide has opened its fourth India property in Chennai. According to the company release, the five-star 204-room Hilton Chennai, positioned as a business hotel, is owned by Empee Group, which has diversified interests from alcoholic beverages to property development.
The budget speech indicated further progress on the Direct Tax Code (DTC) as well as the GST – both critical measures, which is a welcome move. Though, I feel that it would have been better for the industry if GST was also rolled out along with the DTC.
Real Estate developers across the country have termed the Union Budget 2011-12 as a tie cricket match which can’t be termed as won or lost. However, they are all unanimous that it is not a game changer budget for the sector.
The Budget is relying heavily on maintaining the trajectory of growth in the economy to provide solutions for inclusive growth that touch the ‘Aam Aadmi’ and parallelly stressing on governance aspects, which hopefully will be covered separately through concrete action plans to deal with the menace of unaccounted wealth. The trend for consolidation is expected to continue.
It would seem that the Union Budget 2011 pointedly ignored the larger issues affecting the Indian real estate sector at this sensitive stage of revival and growth.
We are happy with the governments focus on affordable housing. Loan amount that qualifies under priority sector lending. Now, a home loan of Rs. 25 lakh would qualify as priority sector lending.
The unfulfilled demand of more than 24 million houses in the country needs large scale impetus to achieve desired results. Allowing deduction for investment into affordable housing is a welcome step and will surely boost morale of housing industry and will accelerate investments in affordable housing.
Affordable Housing development is expected to be encouraged with the announcement of a new Housing Mortgage Guarantee Fund which will cover the risk of Housing Finance Companies for lending to less advantaged sections of society.
With the reasonable expectation of a roof over the head not very long ago, the real estate boom in the last decade has scaled up the liberty of choice for the average home buyers. While the aspirations of even the middle and lower middle income with moderate budgets have gone up, there are very many residential projects launched in recent times that seem to fill the gap with the promise of faster deliveries, hi-tech amenities, luxurious lifestyle, lush green surroundings within the affordable range of 20-40 lakhs.
Reforms in the real estate sector is the need of the hour for tackling issues like high stamp duty which often results in otherwise honest people having to deal in black money, according to the Economic Survey 2010-11 tabled by Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee in the Lok Sabha on Friday.