Buyers can’t be fooled all the time: Lessons from a 50% fall in home sales in Delhi

India-Real-Estate-MarketVivek Kaul

If you are still in denial that all is well with the real estate sector, this should wake you up. The real estate consultant Knight Frank has released a research report in which it points out the depressing state of the real estate sector in Delhi and the National Capital Region.

As analyst Ankita Sood writing for Knight Frank points out: “The market registered a year on year dip of 50%, with 14,250 units sold.” Hence, home sales in the National Capital Region for the period January to June 2015 dropped by 50% in comparison to the same period last year.

At the same time the number of new launches also fell dramatically by 68% in January to June 2015 in comparison to the same period last year. The new project launches stood at 11,360 units.

There are a number of lessons that can be drawn from these numbers:

1) Investors do not have endless patience: The real estate market in and around Delhi has primarily been investor driven. This is primarily because of the massive amount of black money that the city manages to generate. Black money is money which has been earned but on which taxes have not been paid.
Falling home sales clearly indicate that investors are no longer interested in buying more new homes, given that they are still sitting on the ones they had bought over the last few years. And the returns on these apartments have been negative or next to nothing. Hence, investors are looking to sell out the homes they had bought.

As Sood writes: “The growth rate of the weighted average price has been witnessing a downward trend since 2013, and has slowed down considerably…Long-term investors who were with the developers over the 3–4 year construction period are now looking for an exit, owing to the depressed market sentiments. Stagnant prices and delayed project deliveries have contributed towards investors entering into a ‘distressed resale’ mode, as they are now offering to exit at a 15% to 20% discount than the primary market price.”

This “offer to exit” at 15 to 20% discount tells us very clearly that real estate prices do fall. And as more and more investors hit the market to sell what they have been sitting on, prices will fall further.

2) The total amount of black money coming into real estate has been coming down: As far as the metropolitan cities in India is concerned, the maximum amount of black money goes into real estate in Delhi. As analysts Saurabh Mukherjea and Sumit Shekhar of Ambit write in a recent research report titled Real Estate: The unwind and its side effects: “In Delhi, the ratio of unaccounted value of real estate transactions to the total value is as high as 78%. The same ratio is 50% in Kolkata and Bangalore. In smaller towns and semi urban centres, nearly 100% of property transactions are conducted in cash.” In Mumbai, they put the ratio of black money to total value at between 10-30%.

Hence, among the bigger cities, the maximum amount of black money goes into real estate in Delhi and the National Capital Region. And this has been coming down. How can we conclude that? The Delhi and the National Capital Region have approximately 189,678 unsold units, Knight Frank data suggests.
If black money were coming into real estate at the same pace as before, this number would have been much lower. A fall in new launches by 68% is another good indicator that black money coming into the sector has been coming down.

3) You can’t fool all the people all the time: The Delhi and the National Capital Region has had too many instances of builders disappearing as well as not delivering homes on time. As Santhosh Kumar, CEO – Operations & International Director, JLL India, wrote in a recent research note: “The National Capital Region (NCR) has some locations that buyers are best advised to avoid. Various issues like delays in delivery, oversupply, speculation and infrastructure deficit have been plaguing these markets, rendering them unsuitable for first-time home purchase.”

Kumar gives the example of the Greater Faridabad area. As he writes: “Many instances of fly-by-night operators (and even some established developers) reneging on their commitments to buyers have been evident in Greater Faridabad. There have even been cases of developers absconding altogether after selling as many flats as they could without finishing the projects.”

Obviously, such fraud cannot go on forever. Buyers have come to know about these things over a period of time and have decided to stay away from buying real estate. In fact, Kumar even warns people to stay away from under-construction property, such is the state of real estate in Delhi and National Capital Region.
As he writes: “Keep away from pre-launches. Instead, look for bargain buys when investors exit. At that point of time, construction will be closer to completion or completed, and Gurgaon is witnessing distress sales from investors.”

A real estate consultant asking people not to invest in pre-launches needs to be taken very seriously.

4) An end user market:  With investors staying away and the total amount of black money finding its way into real estate coming down, if things continue in this way, Delhi and the National Capital Region real estate market, will become a market which is driven by those people who are looking for a home to live in, rather than invest. In fact, Sood of Knight Frank suggests that is already the case: “NCR is now an end user-driven market – developers restrict new launches, while buyers carefully select clean projects.”

5) You can’t keep making a product which the consumer does not want: The main reason why the real estate sector is in a mess is because prices have gone way beyond what most people can afford. This is a fundamental reason that most people associated with real estate refuse to acknowledge. On being given this reason, they come up with reasons like there is corruption in the government, laws are complicated, so on and so forth.

These might be genuine reasons but that does not negate the point that real estate prices have gone way beyond what most people can afford. Even the “rich” that real estate companies were building for cannot afford real estate at current prices. A product cannot be endlessly priced above what people are willing to pay for it.

As Knight Frank points out: “Policy fallacies such as the opening up of new land for development, allotment of group housing licences in areas with no infrastructure, project delays due to litigations and the liquidity crunch, and stagnant incomes[emphasis is mine] have affected NCR’s real estate appetite adversely.”

It is nice to see a real estate consultant acknowledge stagnant incomes as one of the reasons for one of the mess in the real estate sector. What it means in simple English is that incomes haven’t been able to keep pace with real estate prices i.e. prices are now way beyond what people can afford. And this cannot go on forever.

The column first appeared on Firstpost on July 30, 2015

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)

Dear homebuyer, here is another real estate trick you need to be aware of


The National Capital Region(NCR) remains a hot bed of real estate scams. Here is a new one I recently came across. And this is how it operates.
A customer buys an under-construction flat which is in an advanced stage of construction, under a 60:40 scheme. The way this works is that the customer has to pay 60% of the price of flat within 30 days of booking it. The remaining 40% is to be paid when the flat is ready for possession.
Of course, being a part of the middle class, the customer has also taken on a home loan to buy the flat. As is the norm, the housing finance institution from which the loan is taken, finances 80% of the price of the flat and the remaining 20% is put in by the buyer himself.
Given that the flat is still under construction, a pre-EMI, which amounts to 50% of the actual EMI on the loan, has to be paid. The payment of the full EMI kicks-in only after the buyer has taken possession of the flat.
So far so good. Now this is where things get interesting. The pre-EMIs get automatically debited from the buyer’s account for a few months. A visit to the site reveals that the project is moving at a slow pace and will be delayed by a few months.
The buyer is still happy given that many builders in the Uttar Pradesh side of NCR have stopped construction for a long time, due to what they call a “labour strike”. Also, the dream of owning a home is so strong that a delay of few months doesn’t really matter.
A few days after having visited the site, the buyer gets a letter from the builder titled “offer for possession”. The letter simply asks the buyer to pay up the remaining 40% of the amount within the next 15 days. Further, he needs to inform the builder when he wants to take the possession of the flat, so that the finishing touches can be put to the flat before it is handed over.
Also, the letter clearly states that if the buyer doesn’t pay up within the next 15 days, the builder won’t complete the work.
This makes the buyer wonder that how could the builder have completed the work so quickly. The last time he had gone on a site visit, a lot remained to be done. A couple of phone calls to well-meaning friends reveal that this has been a standard operating procedure for the builders in the recent past in the NCR, where they send out offer for possession letters, much before the flat is completely built.
The reason for this is straightforward—the cheapest way for the builder to raise money is from the buyer. On everything else, he has to pay interest. Also, with the real estate sector on a slide (the unsold inventory of homes in NCR is close to 6 years now), this is one way of ensuring that the builder does not put further money into the project.
By putting a 15 day deadline, the builder comes to know exactly who are the people interested in taking possession, and completes only a specified number of flats. The remaining flats can wait till the housing market starts to recover.
The buyer obviously is caught in this now—having already paid 60% of the money, there is no way he can back out. So, he goes to the housing finance company, takes on the remaining part of the home loan and pays the builder the remaining amount.
It is obvious that at this point of time the buyer will want to go visit the site and see how much progress has been made and how soon the flat is likely to be handed over. Given that, there has not been much progress from the last time he had been there, the builder has cordoned off the site completely.
So, there is no way of figuring out how the construction of the flat is coming along. Further, with the buyer now taking on the full amount of the home loan, the full EMI kicks-in. So, the buyer is now paying the rent as well as the EMI, throwing his monthly finances completely in disarray.
Meanwhile, the builder has also managed to collect the first year’s maintenance charges in advance from the buyer. And at the same time, the builder hasn’t paid a single penny for the delay in handing over the possession of the flat. Though, if the buyer delays any payment even by a single day, the builder is very prompt in fining him. And so the story goes.
Given that, there are no quick redressal mechanisms for real estate issues (or for that matter anything else) in this country, the ‘genuine’ buyers who are buying homes to live in and not as an investment, typically tend to go along with whatever the builder wants them to.
As is the case with life, so is the case in real estate—the small guy generally loses.

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek)

The column originally appeared on Firstpost on May 14, 2015 

Five questions for Rahul Gandhi on his sudden love for distressed home buyers

RAHUL GANDHI SHASHI THAROORVivek Kaul

Rahul Gandhi is on a learning spree these days. Yesterday he learnt that Indian middle class also has a problem. A report in The Indian Express points out Rahul as saying: “Mujhe aaj kuch seekhne ko mila. Meri soch thi ki zameen ke mamle pe kisan ko, mazdoor ko, adivasiyon ko dabaya jaata hain. Magar aaj mujhe seekhne ko mila, zameen ke mamle pe middle class logon ko bhi dabaya jaata hai. (I learnt something today. So far, I used to think that only farmers, labourers and tribals are suppressed in land matters. But today I learnt that the middle class is also suppressed).”
The Gandhi family scion said this after meeting distressed home buyers in the National Capital Region. That he did not know that the issue of “land” also impacts the country’s middle class, after having been an MP for more than a decade, is a clear indicator of how well connected he has been with issues that concern the people of this country. But yes he is trying and it’s never too late.
Rahul also said: “They are told that you will get the flat on a particular day but for years they don’t get the flat. They are told the super duper area of the flat would be so much but what is delivered is different.”
There are multiple questions that crop up here. The situation that these home buyers are in currently, did not crop up over the last one year of the Narendra Modi government. It has been work in progress since 2008. So why has Rahul woken up to it now? The answer is fairly straightforward. This sudden concern for the middle class home buyer is a part of the Rahul relaunch.
The second question is how have all these builders managed to get away with taking money from the buyers and not delivering homes even many years later. Rahul met distressed home buyers from the National Capital Region. The Congress party was in power in Haryana (parts of which come under the National Capital Region) for an extended period of time. What did this government do for distressed home buyers in the city of Gurgaon, which is a part of the National Capital Region?
The third question is how have real estate builders in this country managed to have a free run for all these years. When almost every form of investment in this country is regulated, be it mutual funds, stocks, insurance, derivatives and so on, how has real estate managed to be given a free run for so long? The Congress party has been in power at the centre in every decade since independence. Why did it do nothing on this front all these years? Why was the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Bill introduced only as late as 2013? This after the Congress led UPA government had been in power in Delhi for nine years. Maybe, Rahul can explain all this to the people of this country as well, the next time he decided to speak to the media.
The fourth question is that when opening something as simple as a savings bank account requires multiple documents, why can real estate be almost be bought over the counter, as long as the buyer is willing to pay in cash? How did the system evolve in the way it has? Guess, Rahul can speak to his seniors in the Congress party and maybe they can give him an answer.
The fifth question is what has Rahul’s Congress party done to control the amount of black money being generated in the country, in all the years that it has been in power. As per the Global Financial Integrity report titled
Illicit Financial Flows from Developing Countries: 2003-2012, around $439.6 billion of black money left the Indian shores, between 2003 and 2012. If this was the amount of black money that left the Indian shores, imagine the kind of black money that must have been generated during the period.
The Congress led UPA government was in power for much of this period. A substantial portion of the black money that is generated finds its way into real estate, driving up prices and making things very difficult for genuine home buyers who want to buy homes to live in them.
This has led to a situation where the real estate market has totally become investor driven. What did the Congress led UPA government do about this in the ten years that it has been in power?
To conclude, since Rahul Gandhi is in a learning phase, it’s time he saw Yash Chopra’s 1965 classic
Waqt. And in it he should concentrate on a dialogue written by Akhtar-Ul-Iman and spoken by Raj Kumar in the movie, which goes like this: “Chinoi Seth…jinke apne ghar sheeshe ke hon, wo dusron par pathar nahi feka karte(Chinoi Seth…those who live in glass houses don’t throw stones at others).”

(Vivek Kaul is the author of the Easy Money trilogy. He tweets @kaul_vivek) 

The column originally appeared on DailyO on May 4, 2015