Real Estate prices are down: Best time to book your property

By Ashok Arti, Director Delhi Infratech
You might have heard the famous saying, “the best investment on earth is a piece of earth”. Buying your own property, may it be commercial or residential, is always fruitful, but what matters is the added advantage in terms of profits and savings that one can make, the greater the better!

With the inventory of properties going higher among the sellers, the property rates have been visibly hit. Along with this, the real estate developers are not able to control their cravings for developing more properties, which needs a constant flow of cash. Although the cost of cement and steel has decreased, the cost of labour has been going higher in the last year or so. Therefore, on one hand, developers have invested a lot of money in shaping up their projects, many of which remain unsold, thus locking up their investments; they also need cash for developing the projects that they desire. This leads to a tradeoff between the need for cash and the urge to secure profits, which eventually keep the pricing flat. So, taking all this into consideration, it would be safe to say that the property rates are the best possible in the current day, and are not going to go down any further.

Despite the customers asking for increased discounts, the sellers are held at bay to surrender to the demands. Lowering the prices might mean losses that no seller desires. Sellers would opt for an increased holding period rather than sell off their investments at lower rates. They like to believe that eventually real estate prices are going to go up in time. Particularly in the Delhi-NCR region the growth in prices is expected to be high after March 2017. Real Estate companies are planning to deliver 45,000 units of properties by the end of March 2017, and that would lead to renewed faith in developers who had a history of unkempt promises in the past.

With the GDP of India showing good signs of getting increased and the rural population being large, demand for housing in urban areas shall increase. As soon as the buying power of rural people starts increasing, they tend to shift to urban areas to secure the benefits of a more cosy life. This trend which is likely to multiply itself, shall have a great impact on the property rates leading to a steep and a sharp increase in property rates in the near future.

The last budget can also be a game changer as it has paved way for the flow of funds from foreign investors. Now FDI can be secured for projects of 20,000 sq meters rather than 50,000 sq meters. Also, a strong point of the budget was that Rs 4,000 crore have been sanctioned for providing cheaper loans under the “housing for all 2022” scheme. All of this is going to boost the realty sector again and when we take all, the entire positive aspects into consideration, we can see some good news in the industry which is likely to make the prices surge. Some online property domains have already informed of an increase in the number of inquiries after the previous budget was out.

In essence buying your own property would be one of the priciest and the biggest purchases that you will make in your life; any investment shall be done with great care. With property rates being low at the moment, this is your chance to secure your real estate. But the buyers should remain cautious about the offers made by various companies as they might have strings attached to them, which make them hard to implement on the ground. An intelligent way is to ask for an upfront discount or ask for free bonuses like free parking and free club membership.