Track2Realty: With economy witnessing a downturn, interest rates and inflation reaching all-time highs, 2013 has been one of the most eventful years for Real Estate in India. While introduction of Real Estate Regulatory Bill and Land Acquisitions Bills in the Parliament was positive for the real estate industry, end users sitting on the fence expecting a fall in prices lead to a contraction of demand in the past few quarters.
Track2Realty Exclusive: While the Indian real estate has been on a copy & paste mode in the last three years where not much support has been extended by the market or the policy makers, there is a strong optimism within the built environment that 2014 would be a turnaround year. Though nothing much has changed in terms of issues & concerns of the sector as another year comes to the end, some of the policy decisions in the last six months indicate the sector is finally on the road to recovery.
Track2Realty Exclusive: Real estate gains are not always short-term but often long-term from investment point of view. The same can be said about 2013 where despite of an outside view dismissing the year 2013 for low sales velocity, piling inventory, liquidity crunch and policy ambiguity, added to the country moving to the General Elections in 2014, the sector has managed to pave the way for long term reforms.
Track2Realty Exclusive: The Coimbatore real estate has by and large outperformed the rest of the country. This better-than-national average performance during the year 2013 has been remarkable at a time when some of the matured property markets were witness to sales plummeting with stress both at the buyers’ as well as developers’ level.
Track2Realty: 2013 was one of much economic turbulence. High retail inflation, high interest rates and a continuous fall in the rupee value, have been slowing the overall growth and have continuously hindered the investment sentiment in the market during the entire 2013.
Track2Realty Exclusive: Looking back at the year 2013, Indian real estate has witnessed a variety of changes from IT perspective. The trend which started much before 2013, continued with industry’s growing focus on putting IT systems in place to manage business processes to effectively manage real estate organization.
Track2Realty Exclusive: A great challenge in real estate branding is the local versus national market. 90 per cent of the realty brands have local presence and not pan India. Most of the projects are linked locally like Prestige with Bangalore or DLF with Gurgaon.
Track2Realty: India continued to feature on the list of the world’s most expensive office markets, with New Delhi (Connaught Place – CBD) ranking at the 7th position, according to CBRE Global Research and Consulting’s semi-annual Prime Office Occupancy Costs survey. Mumbai’s Bandra Kurla Complex (BKC) bagged the 15th position, while Nariman Point stood at the 32nd position. The latest CBRE survey provides data on office rents and occupancy costs as of September 2013.
Track2Realty: Total net office space absorption recorded a 25% decline in across top eight cities over last year. According to the annual year end estimations by Cushman & Wakefield the total net absorption for 2013 was recorded at 23 million square feet (msf). Most cities have witnessed a decline in net absorption in the range of 20-40% during the year, except Pune where incremental new space take-up increased by 15% in 2013.
Track2Realty: There are still significant investment opportunities left in India’s real estate market. For investors looking at cost-effective projects to park their funds, this might be a right time as weak market sentiments are likely to lead to weak valuations, providing windows for investing in quality projects.