Track2Realty Exclusive: One of the most ardent desires of an individual is to own a house with location and comfort being the determining factors in most of the cases. However, to get access to shopping facilities or entertainment hubs or medical care or even to commute to workplace remains a sheer imagination almost beyond fulfilment in India.
Track2Realty: Describing Union Finance Minister’s Arun Jaitley’s maiden budget as “half glass full” and half filled with hopes, realtors’ apex body CREDAI Chairman Lalit Kumar Jain said it met with some expectations and left some out.
Track2Realty Exclusive: All major cities are crowded beyond their limits and most are replete with problems like traffic, pollution, housing problems, lack of space, not to mention the ever-rising cost of living. Industry experts believe that integrated townships are the best solution proposed to counter the problem of crowded cities.
Track2Realty: The alarm on a tough upcoming budget was sounded when the newly elected Prime Minister said that “time has come to take tough decisions in the interest of the nation. Prime Minister Narendra Modi is taking all due measures towards his vision of a ‘Shresht Bharat’, amidst some calibrated tough measures.
Track2Realty: The commercial real estate office segment in India is primarily a leasing market. Although Indian firms have traditionally preferred to purchase office properties for their own businesses, multi-national entities in the country typically prefer to lease office space.
Track2Realty: The reduced apartment sizes in new launches in 2014 have contributed to making prices more affordable. In the over 50,000 mid segment units (1 and 2 BHKs) of newly launched houses across top eight cities in Quarter 1 of 2014, most cities have seen a reduction in sizes of approximately 100 sf. This has led to an average drop of 6 percent in cost of the apartments within these cities, says a report by Cushman & Wakefield.
Track2Realty Exclusive: Only some years ago, when the National Housing Board brought out a survey report saying that India will need at least 26 million houses by the end of 2020, that the idea of privately built township or townships built on PPP model first germinated. Large tracts of land which were lying at the outskirts of cities were looked at with a lot of hope and dreams to offer better living to Indians at affordable prices.
Track2Realty Exclusive: Coming out of the shadow of Gurgaon-Manesar the once sleepy town in Bhiwadi is fast shedding the tag of affordable destination. What was initially conceptualised as an affordable residential market for those who could not afford high property prices in Gurgaon and for the industries that could settle in a moderately priced market has shaped up so very well that Bhiwadi today has emerged as a case study in how even the extension of a satellite town should be positioned.
Track2Realty Exclusive: The Government of India has been re-evaluating policy measures and modifying these or initiating fresh mandates in order to give a boost to the industry. Changes in policies pertaining to SEZs towards reducing area requirements, the easing of norms for external commercial borrowing (ECB) for development of affordable housing and the augmentation of limits for listed NCDs will go a long way in clearing bottlenecks faced by the sector.
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.