Tuesday 27 October 2015

Impact of property price slump in Delhi

It has always been a dream for any prospective home buyer to own a residential property in India’s capital – Delhi. For many years, property developers had a great control over the real estate market in the capital city. The pricing was more when compared to other parts of the country and in spite of it there was a great demand. But the whole situation has turned upside down now.  Fortunately or unfortunately, there are more residential units waiting to be occupied in the capital city. This is because neither the property developers are willing to bring down their selling prices nor the home buyers are willing to pay the asking values. As a result, Delhi real estate has reached a stalemate situation as no transaction is taking place. 
To ease the situation, either the government is expected to take an initiative to increase the confidence of the home buyers or the sellers expected to relax their stand and lower their selling prices. Since nothing is happening at the moment, the residential realty market in Delhi is beginning to crumble.

New project launches have dropped down to nearly sixty percent in the first half of this year itself while the sales of such properties have dropped down to a massive fifty percent during the same time period. The slump in new project launches and sales clearly points out the resistance of the buyers towards highly-priced and unappealingly priced units. According to recent reports, there are nearly one lakh eighty thousand unsold dwelling units in NCR alone and at this pace of sales it is expected to take nearly five years to sell them all. This demand-less situation has in fact driven property developers to look for ways to exhaust their present inventory in hand instead of constructing new ones and blocking their finances by investing on them.

NCR was an investor’s marketplace once upon a time when there were more takers even if the property developers hiked their property values artificially. With buyers becoming wary of making purchases instinctively, distressed sellers are providing discounts from twenty to thirty to percent to recover the money that has been blocked as apartments in Delhi. But this bait has not lured investors since they too do not want to invest their hard earned money in projects that are going to appreciate at a very slower pace. Many are even extra cautious to buy clean and non-controversial projects. Some of the suburbs where the values of flats for sale in Delhi have dropped include Dwarka, Mayur Vihar and NCR.

Since realty market drives the economy of the country, experts are of the view that the situation will ease soon.  The socio-politico scenario too is getting better with the rule of a stable government in place. In addition to it, the focus is more on infrastructure and land development that many believe that it would stimulate the demand. Increase in salaries and lower EMIs will be a reality in the near future whereby increasing the buying capacity of individuals too.

2 comments: