By: Sunil Dahiya, Sr Vice President, NAREDCO
The real estate sector is ready to have its own regulator. Sector is actually craving for a regulator as we have come to understand that a single window will give us a way forward to growth and customer satisfaction. At this moment we are living in a regime of 40 NOC’s to a project and still no permission to function. It has no meaning and it does not give us the freedom to grow.
Even today, if a labourer falls from a building under construction, the developer is at risk. But after the developer has handed over the building, and if there is a mishap and someone dies, who takes the blame? Are the state agencies taking any responsibility? That is the question that needs to be answered. So if the regulator wants to regulate, it also becomes his responsibility to deliver the product.
If all the talk is in the interest of the consumers’ then all the stake holders need to understand that the only factor which can safeguard the consumers’ interest is to check the speculative buying, because it hits the real consumers more than the developers.
Today 40 per cent of the investors are speculators, without a 100 per cent cash flow. They don’t even have enough credit reliability either, and that puts the rest 60 per cent genuine buyers at risk for which the developer is blamed. The regulator does not have any answer on how to catch hold of speculative investors and how to make the defaulters pay up the full amount. As of now there is no law to recover the balance payment from the defaulter but there are 40-50 laws with those defaulters to take the developers to gallows.
Now with this Regulation Bill, which is coming through ideation at the Centre, a new beginning could have been made. But the developers and the consumers are not being involved in ideation, only the authorities are doing it. The industry needs to be consulted on how to design what they want to make, consumers’ feedback is necessary as what they want to buy.
Unfortunately, there is no such forum to do this. As a result, the aspiration of town planners today is Chandigarh and the aspiration of the consumers is Dubai. There is a huge lag between the designing and the delivery of the product. The bylaws today define an FAR of 1.5-3.5, in which only Chandigarh can be designed whereas the public aspiration is Dubai.
