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Ten Things to Remember While Buying a Home

This piece emerged out of a couple of WhatsApp conversations I had over this weekend, along with a few emails that I have received over the last few months.

From these conversations and in trying to answer the emails, I have tried to develop a sort of checklist of things to keep in mind, while buying a home. Of course, as I have said in the past, when it comes to personal finance, each person’s situation is unique, and which is why it’s called personal finance.

Nevertheless, there are a few general principles that can be kept in mind. Also, this list like all checklists, is complete to the extent of things I can think of.

So, let this not limit your thinking and the points that you need to keep in mind.

Here we go.

1) If you are buying the house as an investment (not in my scheme of things, but nonetheless), please learn how to calculate the internal rate of return on an investment. Believe me, you will thank me for the rest of your life.

Also, keep track of the cost of maintaining a house and other costs that come with it. Only then will you be able to know the real rate of return from investing in a house.

Otherwise, you will talk like others do, I bought it at x and I sold it at 2x, and get lost in the big numbers, thinking you have made huge returns. While this sort of conversation sounds impressive, it doesn’t mean anything.

2) Don’t buy a house to generate a regular income. The home rentals in the bigger cities have come down post covid. Even if they haven’t, the rental yields (rent divided by market price) continue to be lower than what you would earn if you had that money invested in a fixed deposit (despite such low interest rates).

Of course, the corollary here is that as a landlord you choose to declare your rental income and pay an income tax on it. Many landlords prefer to be totally or partially paid in cash and choose not to pay any income tax. 

3) From what I have been able to gather from my conversations, people in a few cities are still flipping houses. In fact, the trick is to invest before a project gets a RERA approval and then sell out as soon as the approval comes through. This reminds me of the old days when the builder never really knew the people who ended up living in the homes that had been built.

Anyway, if you are flipping homes, do remember that many people caught in the real estate shenanigans of 2009 to 2011, are still waiting for their homes. Many of them are investors. So, if you are flipping homes, do take some basic precautions like not betting your life on any one deal. As the old cliche goes, don’t put all your eggs in one basket. 

4) Also, do remember that you are an individual and the builder is a builder. While many stories of David beating the Goliath have come out in the media, many more stories of Goliaths having crushed Davids, never made it to the media.

It was, is and will remain, an unequal fight. Do remember that. For a builder this is the life that he leads, you, dear reader, on the other hand, have many other things to do. And you are looking for a home to live in, not a builder to take on. So, be careful.

5) One question that I often get is, which bank/housing finance company should I take a loan from. I don’t think this should matter much. Most big banks and housing finance companies charge similar interest rates. As we say in Hindi, bus unees bees ka farak hai.

So, go to the financial institution which seems to be the most convenient to you.

6) One story being pushed in the media is that you should buy a home now because interest rates are low. Among many dumb reasons for buying a home, this is by far the dumbest. Interest rates on home loans are not fixed but floating interest rate loans. If the cost of borrowing for banks and housing finance companies goes up, so will the interest rate on floating rate home loans.

No one can predict which way interest rates will go in the medium to long-term (That doesn’t stop people from trying. Many economists build careers around this). So, currently, the interest rate on a home loan is around 7% per year or thereabouts. If you are buying a home, make sure that you have the capacity to keep repaying the EMI even at an interest rate of 10% per year. This is very important.

7) How do you structure the amount you pay for the home? What portion of the home price should be a downpayment? What portion of the home price should be your home loan? These are very important questions. The answer varies from person to person. Nevertheless, the one general principle I would like to state here is that don’t dip into your retirement savings as far as possible to pay for the downpayment.

It might seem like a good idea with retirement far away and your parents encouraging you to do so because they did the same and it worked out fine for them. Nevertheless, do remember that on an average the current generation will live longer than its parents, and the family support that your parents had or will have in their old age, you may never have.

8) Also, from the point of diversification, it makes sense not to bet all your savings on making the downpayment for a home. Do remember, no job or source of income is safe these days. Further, do ensure that at any point of time you have the ability to pay six to 12 EMIs, without having a regular source of income.

Other than being able to continue repaying your EMI, it will also help you have some time to look for a job or another source of income, if the current one goes kaput.  Money in the bank, buys you time, which helps you make better decisions in life.

And most importantly, if your EMI is more than a third of your take home salary or monthly income, rest assured you are in for trouble on the financial front.

9) If you want to buy a home to live in, go for a ready to move in home. I have seen completion dates for RERA approved projects going beyond 2025 in Mumbai.

The other advantage with a ready to move in home is that some people are already living there and if there is some problem with the building (not a huge deal in India) then there are many more people who have a stake in solving the problem (as convoluted as this might sound). As always there is strength in numbers. 

10) Finally, be sure why you are buying a home. You want to live close to your place of work. You want your child to have some stability in life. You don’t like the idea of moving homes, every couple of years. And so on.

But please don’t buy a home because your parents, in-laws, extended family or relatives, expect you to do so and it gives them something to chat up on or some meaning to their lives. These are financially difficult times and making the biggest financial decision of your life to impress others, isn’t the smartest thing to do possibly.

To conclude, as I said in the beginning this isn’t a complete list by any stretch of imagination. Each person’s situation is unique. Also, you may not end up with a tick mark on all these points mentioned above and you may still end up buying a home. But the advantage will be that you will know clearly where you are placed in the financial scheme of things.

The points essentially help you think in a structured way to arrive at a decision. They do not make the decision for you. That you will have to do.

PS: Don’t know if you noticed that the terms house and home, have been used at different places. Hope you appreciate the difference between the two. 

Here is Another Good Joke: Latest Income Tax Data Suggests India Has Just 23.7 Lakh Landlords

home

In yesterday’s column, I had explained how only a minuscule portion of India’s population pays a bulk of the personal income tax collected by the government.

This conclusion was drawn based on the detailed income tax data for the assessment years 2013-2014 and 2014-2015, recently released by the government. The income tax returns for the income earned during the financial years 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 were filed during the assessment years 2013-2014 and 2014-2015, respectively.

In late April, earlier this year, the government had released income tax data for the assessment year 2012-2013. Based on this data some interesting observations can be made. In today’s piece, I will look at income from house property declared by Indian taxpayers.

Let’s look at Figure 1. It has details regarding individuals who declared a positive income from house property. Income from house property can also be negative.

Those declaring a negative income from house property would include individuals who have taken on a home loan. Interest paid on a home loan is allowed as a deduction against taxable income within a certain limit, on self-occupied property.

For the assessment years under consideration an interest of up to Rs. 1.5 lakh paid on a home loan could have been taken as a deduction against taxable income.

But that is not of importance in this piece. What we are considering here are taxpayers who are making some money from the homes that they own. These taxpayers are essentially landlords who own homes, rent them out and make money in the process.

 

Figure 1:

Assessment YearNumber of individualsTotal Income declared (in Rs. Crore)Average Income (in Rs.)
2012-201319,95,73933,2771,66,740
2013-201421,87,01739,4981,80,602
2014-201523,66,52745,8991,93,951

Source: Author’s calculations based on data released by the Ministry of Finance.

As per the income tax records, in the assessment year 2014-2015, the total number of landlords in the country stood at around 23.66 lakh. Of course, this number included those showing a notional rent for tax purposes as well.

In the assessment year 2012-2013, the total number of landlords had stood at 19.95 lakh. This means a jump of 18.6 per cent over a two-year period. The average rent collected in assessment year 2014-2015, was at Rs. 1.94 lakh against Rs. 1.67 lakh in assessment year 2012-2013.

The average as usual hide the details. In the assessment year 2014-2015, more than 15.8 lakh individuals declared an average income of Rs. 66,000 from house property during the year. This works out to a monthly income of Rs. 5,500. Or this is the amount that these individuals made every month by renting out their homes.

In the assessment year 2012-2013, more than 14.55 lakh individuals had declared an average income of Rs. 60,000 per year. This works out to a monthly income of Rs. 5,000. Hence, it is safe to say that as per income tax records, the average landlord in the country earned a monthly income of Rs. 5,500 during the assessment year 2014-2015.

This figure seems to be low and out of place with the prevailing rents.  People paying income tax primarily live in the big cities and such a low rent in a big city is practically unheard of.

Also, the total number of landlords in the assessment year 2014-2015 stood at 23.66 lakh. This is an extremely low number. As Arjun Kumar writes in a research paper titled India’s Residential Rental Housing: “More than one-tenth (11.1%) of the households in India lived in rented houses in 2011, and, in this respect, there was a heavy bias towards the urban sector. Almost four-fifths of the total households living in rented houses in India (27.4 million) were in urban sector (21.7 million). Overall, the proportion of households living in rented houses was 3.4% and 27.5% in rural and urban sectors, respectively.”

Hence, the total number of rented houses in the country as per the 2011 Census stood at 27.4 million or 274 lakh. In urban India, the number stood at 21.7 million or 217 lakh. Now compare this to the fact that only 23.7 lakh individuals in the assessment year 2014-2015 declared income from house property. This clearly tells us that many landlords are essentially not declaring the income that they earn from their homes.

It further means that rents are being paid in cash and in the process the total amount of black money in the country has gone up. What is also noteworthy is that Census 2011 numbers are now more than half a decade old. The total number of rental households would have only gone up since then.

In fact, as Kumar writes: “The number of households living in rented houses in India increased by 7.1 million (35.3%), from 20.2 million in 2001 to 27.4 million in 2011. The rate of growth in the number of rented households was higher than that of the growth rate of total number of households (28.5%) in India.” There is no reason for this trend to have changed since 2011.

To conclude, when we talk about the black money problem that prevails in the country we tend to talk about the buying and selling of real estate as being a major reason. Nevertheless, the data clearly suggests that rental income is also a major part of the black money problem.

The column originally appeared in Vivek Kaul’s Diary on November 3, 2016

 

Ek akela is shehar main: This song tells us all that is wrong with Indian real estate

ek akela is shehar mainVivek Kaul

Very few songs survive the test of time. One such song is ek akela is shehar main from the 1977 movie Gharaonda, written by Gulzar, set to tune by Jaidev and sung by Bhupinder Singh. As the lines from the song go:

ek akela is shehar main
raat main aur dopahar main
aabodana dhoondta hai
aashiyana dhoondta hai

(aabodana = food and water. aashiyana = a home)

This iconic song has an iconic scene which most people miss. Some 3 minutes and 26-27 seconds into the song there is a shot of what looks like Marine Drive. The road is full of Premier Padminis (or Fiats as they were better known as) and Ambassadors. If you look carefully enough there is even a white Mercedes somewhere.
The movie Gharaonda was released in 1977 and those were the days when Indians had the option of buying either the Ambassador produced by the Birlas at Uttarpara near Kolkata or the Premier Padmini produced by the Doshis at Kurla in Mumbai. The situation was akin to the early days of the American automobile. Henry Ford, the pioneer of the assembly line system of manufacturing remarked in 1909 that: “any customer can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black.”
In short the customer did not have any choice. The same was true about India in 1977. If one were to paraphrase Ford, “ any customer could buy any car that he wants so long as it is a Padmini or an Ambassador.”
But things have changed since then. Some 37 years later in 2014, a similar shot of the Marine Drive would show so many models of cars that it would be difficult to count the number quickly. This is the impact of competition and a largely free market which operates in the Indian automobile sector with very little interference from the government and in turn politicians. The companies compete with each other in order to offer the best possible features to consumers at the best possible price. This wasn’t the case in 1977 and the Indian consumer had a choice of two models of cars. The free market has clearly changed that.
Now let’s go back to the 1977 song that we started with—ek akela is shehar main. The song is about the inability of a man to buy a home in Mumbai in 1977. Thirty seven years later nothing has changed on that front. In fact, things have only gotten worse.
And the reason for this is very simple. Most homes across Mumbai and large parts of this country remain unaffordable for the same reason as the Indian consumer had a choice of only two cars in 1977. There is no free market in real estate.
Most real estate companies are fronts for politicians. What makes this very clear is the fact that even though there are thousands of real estate companies operating across India, there is not a single pan India real estate company. Forget pan India, there are very few companies that operate across large states. Most of the big real estate companies have an expertise in a particular part of the country. Why is that the case?
The answer lies in the fact that for any real estate company to operate in any part of the country it needs the cooperation of local politicians. And politicians in every area have their favourite real estate companies. This effectively ensures that even though there are many real estate companies there is very little genuine competition among them to offer the best possible home at the best possible price to consumers. Also, it limits the ability of a real estate company to grow in different parts of the country. It is not possible for the same real estate company to manage politicians everywhere. In short, the free market is not allowed to operate.
There is huge government interference in the sector to ensure that the favoured real estate companies continue to benefit. As Bombay First points out in a report titled My Bombay My Dream “Government and the land mafia in fact do not want more land on the market: after all, you make more money out of the spiraling prices resulting from scarcities than you could out of the hard work that goes into more construction.”
Over the years, the major infrastructure projects in Mumbai like the Bandra-Worli Sea Link or the Versova-Ghatkopar metro link, have addressed areas that have already been built up. The Sewri-Nhava Sheva link, which will open up a lot of land for housing is yet to see the light of day.
One excuse that is constantly offered by the real estate companies to justify spiralling prices is the lack of land. While this may be true about a city like Mumbai it is not true about most other Indian cities.
The Indian Institute for Human Settlements in a report titled Urban India 2011: Evidence esimates that “the top 10 cities are estimated to produce about 15% of the GDP, with 8% of the population and just 0.1% of the land area.” So clearly scarcity of land is not an issue.
This situation can be improved significantly if some of the land that the government has been sitting on can be made available for affordable housing. KPMG in a report titled Affordable Housing – A key growth driver in the real estate sector points out “The government holds substantial amount of urban land under ownership of port trusts, the Railways, the Ministry of Defence, land acquired under the Urban Land (Ceiling and Regulation) Act, the Airports Authority of India and other government departments.”
Over and above this the end consumer has almost no access to price and volume trends. He has to go by what brokers and real estate companies tell him. And for these insiders the real estate prices are always on their way up. In this scenario the real estate market is completely rigged in favour of brokers, real estate companies and politicians. This is what the Nobel prize winning economist George Akerlof called a scenario of “asymmetric information”.
As Guy Sorman writes in An Optimist’s Diary “Economic actors don’t all have the same information at their disposal. Without institutions to improve transparency, insiders can easily manipulate markets.” This is precisely what is happening in India—politicians and real estate companies acting as their fronts, have been able to manipulate the entire system in their favour.
And unless this changes, the dream of owning a house will continue to be just a dream. Until then we can thank Gulzar, Jaidev and Bhupinder Singh for this beautiful song and hum it…ek akela is shehar main…

The article originally appeared on www.Firstbiz.com on August 4, 2014

(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)