Interest on Interest Case Can Open a Pandora’s Box. Govt and SC Need to Be Careful

Late last week the central government told the Supreme Court that it was ready to waive off the interest on interest (i.e. compound interest) on loans of up to Rs 2 crore during the moratorium period of six months between March and August 2020.

In an affidavit submitted to the Court, the government said: “The government… has decided that the relief on waiver of compound interest [interest on interest] during the six month moratorium period shall be limited to the most vulnerable category of borrowers. This category of borrowers, in whose case, the compounding of interest will be waived, will be MSME loans and personal loans up to Rs 2 crore.”

This response was as a part of the matter of Gajendra Sharma versus the Union of India.

The Reserve Bank of India refers to retail loans as personal loans. Hence, the types of loans which would get a waiver of compound interest for a period of six months of the moratorium are home loans, vehicle loans, education loans, consumer durables loans, credit card outstandings, normal personal loans and MSME loans. This benefit will be available to all borrowers who have taken loans of up to Rs 2 crore, irrespective of whether they opted for the moratorium or not.

Before offering my views on this, let’s first try and understand the concept of compound interest or interest on interest.

Let’s consider a home loan of Rs 2 crore to be repaid over a period of 20 years (or 240 months) at the rate of 8% per year. Let’s further assume that the loan was taken during the month of March and was immediately put under a moratorium (the need to make this assumption will soon become clear).

The moratorium lasted six months. The simple interest on the loan of Rs 2 crore amounts to Rs 8 lakh (8% of Rs 2 crore divided by 2). This is not how banks operate. They calculate interest on a monthly basis. At 8% per year, the monthly interest works out to 0.67% (8% divided by 12). The interest for the first month works out to Rs 1.33 lakh (0.67% of Rs 2 crore).

Since the loan is under a moratorium and is not being repaid, this interest is added to the loan amount outstanding of Rs 2 crore.
Hence, the loan amount outstanding at the end of the first month is Rs 2.013 crore (Rs 2 crore + Rs 1.33 lakh). In the second month, the interest is calculated on this amount and it works out to Rs 1.34 lakh (0.67% of Rs 2.013 crore).

In this case, we calculate interest on the original outstanding amount of Rs 2 crore. We also calculate the interest on Rs 1.33 lakh, the interest outstanding at the point of the first month, which has become a part of the loan outstanding.

At the end of the second month, the loan amount outstanding is Rs 2.027 crore (Rs 2.013 crore + Rs 1.34 lakh).  This happens every month, over the period of six months, as can be seen in the following table.

Interest on interest

 

Source: Author calculations.

At the end of six months, we end up with a loan outstanding of Rs 2.081 crore. This is Rs 8.134 lakh more than the initial loan outstanding of Rs 2 crore. As mentioned initially, the simple interest on Rs 2 crore at 8% for a period of six months works out to Rs 8 lakh.

Hence, the interest on interest works out to Rs 13,452 (Rs 8.134 lakh minus Rs 8 lakh).

What was the point behind doing all this math and trying to explain compound interest here?

The maximum amount on which the government is ready to waive off interest on interest is Rs 2 crore. For the kinds of loan under consideration Rs 2 crore outstanding is likely to be either on a home loan or a SME loan. In case of an SME loan, the interest rate will probably be more than 8%.

On a home loan of Rs 2 crore at 8% with 240 instalments (20 years) left to pay, the interest on interest for a period of six months works out close to Rs 13,500. The point is if an individual can afford to take on a loan of Rs 2 crore at 8% interest and pay an EMI of Rs 1.67 lakh, he can also pay an interest on interest of Rs 13,452. In case of an SME loan, the interest on interest would be higher than Rs 13,432, but it wouldn’t be an unaffordable amount. So, what’s the point of doing this?

An estimate made by Kotak Institutional Equities suggests that this move is likely to cost the government around Rs 8,000 crore (Rs 5,000 crore for banks + Rs 3,000 crore for non-banking finance companies (NBFCs)). While Rs 8,000 crore isn’t exactly small change but it’s not a very large amount for the central government.

But that’s not the point here. This move and the Supreme Court dabbling in this case will end up opening a pandora’s box. Let’s take a look at this pointwise.

1) Media reports suggest that the Supreme Court is not happy with the government’s offer to waive off interest on interest. A report on NDTV.com suggests that waiving interest on interest on loans of up to Rs 2 crore “was not satisfactory and asked for a do-over in a week”.

As the report points out: “The affidavit “fails to deal with several issues raised by petitioners”, the court said. The central government has been asked to consider the concerns of the real estate and power producers in fresh affidavits.” Clearly, neither the Court nor the companies are happy with interest on interest of loans of up to Rs 2 crore being waived off.
By offering to waive off interest on interest the government is trying to meet the Court halfway. Also, it is important that the Court along with the government realise that they are interfering with the process of interest setting by banks, something that largely works well.

What is interest at the end of the day? Interest is the price of money. By taking on this case, the Supreme Court has essentially gotten into deciding the price of money. When a bank pays an interest to a deposit holder, it is basically compensating the deposit holder for not spending the money immediately and saving it. This saving is then lent out to anyone who needs the money. This is how the financial intermediation process works.

The government and the Court are both trying to fiddle around with the price of money and that is not a good thing. Today one set of companies have approached the Court to decide on the price of money, tomorrow another set might do the same.

2) The companies are clearly not happy with the interest on interest waiver offer primarily because their loans are greater than Rs 2 crore and they want more. This is hardly surprising.

In the affidavit the government has said: “If the government were to consider waiving interest on all the loan and advances to all classes and categories of borrowers corresponding to the six-month period for which the moratorium was made available under the relevant RBI circulars, the estimated amount is Rs 6 lakh crore.”

To this, the response of the real estate lobby CREDAI was: “A lot of facts and figures in the government’s affidavit are without any basis and the finance ministry’s estimate that waiving off interest on loans to every category would cost banks Rs 6 lakh crore is wrong.”

It is easy to verify this with a simple back of the envelope calculation. As of March 2020, the non-food credit of banks was at Rs 103.2 lakh crore. The banks give loans to Food Corporation of India and other state procurement agencies to buy rice and wheat directly from farmers. Once these loans are subtracted from the overall loans of banks, what is left is non-food credit.

The weighted average lending rate of scheduled commercial banks was at 10% in March 2020 (This is publicly available data). Just the simple interest on non-food credit for six months works out to Rs 5.16 lakh crore (10% of Rs 103.2 lakh crore divided by 2).

Over and above this, there is lending carried out by NBFCs, on which interest on interest will have to be waived off as well. Also, once we take compound interest into account, Rs 6 lakh crore is clearly not a wrong figure as CREDAI wants us to believe.

The weighted average lending interest rate has fallen a little since March. In August, the weighted average lending rate of scheduled commercial banks was at 9.65%. Even after taking this into account, Rs 6 lakh crore is not an unrealistic number at all.  The government and the SC need to be careful regarding any demands of lowering interest rates on loans.

3) The real estate companies have an incentive in getting as much from the Court as possible. Financially, many of them are overleveraged. In fact, the former RBI Governor Urjit Patel in his book Overdraft refers to them as ‘living dead’ borrowers or zombies. And a living dead borrower will go as far as possible to survive at the cost of others. Any new bailout allows them to survive in order to die another day. Also, it allows them to continue not cutting home prices.

Clearly, companies want some reworking on the interest front (the interest on interest for a period of six months isn’t going to amount to much). But this raises a few fundamental questions.

If the Court and the government get around to cutting interest rates on loans, they will be deciding on the price of money. If they do it this one time, they are basically giving Indian capitalists the idea that they can approach the courts and challenge the price of money being charged. What stops it from happening over and over again?

While the government does try and influence the interest rates charged on loans by public sector banks, it can’t do so when it comes to private banks, which now form around 35% of the market when it comes to loans. Nevertheless, if any decision lowering interest rates is made they will end up influencing the price of money of private banks as well. And that isn’t a good thing. The last thing you want in a period of economic contraction is to try and disturb the banking system in any way.

4) Also, any interest rate waiver or reduction will give political parties ideas, like waiving off agricultural loans they can waive off other loans as well. And that can’t be a good thing for the stability of the Indian banking system.

5) If the government really wants to help businesses it can do so by reforming the goods and services tax and making it more user friendly. That will go a much longer way in helping the Indian economy without disturbing a process which currently works well. Any fiddling around with interest rates is largely going to help only zombie companies.

As Urjit Patel writes in Overdraft: “Sowing disorder by confusing issues is a tried-and-trusted, distressingly often successful routine by which stakeholders, official and private, plant the seeds of policy/regulation reversal in India.” This time is no different. Hence, both the government and the Supreme Court need to be very careful in how they deal with this. It is ultimately, the hard earned money of millions of Indians which is at stake. The Indian banking system is one of the few systems which people continue to trust. You wouldn’t want that to break down.

 

Why HDFC Finds Homes to Be More Affordable, When They Clearly Aren’t

Summary: HDFC is getting better home loan customers that doesn’t mean homes have become more affordable. HDFC’s conclusion of homes becoming more affordable is an excellent example of survivorship bias.

Before I start writing this, I have a confession to make. I have written about this issue before, around five years back. But given that things haven’t really changed since then, it is a good time to write about it again. Hence, to all my regular readers who have been following me over the years and might have read this earlier, sincere apologies in advance.

Home loans in India are given by two kinds of institutions – banks and housing finance companies (HFCs). Among the HFCs, Housing Development Finance Corporation (HDFC) has been a pioneer in the area of home loans.

The company regularly publishes an investor presentation along with every quarterly result.

I am not sure for how long the company has been doing this, but its website has these presentations going as far back as March 2013, a little over seven years. Since then, the company has had a slide in its investor presentation which talks about the improved affordability of owning a home in India. Usually, it is the eight or the ninth slide in the presentation (sometimes, but very rarely tenth).

This is the slide in the latest presentation for the period April to June 2020.

Improved affordability of homes

Source: HDFC Investor Presentation, June 30, 2020.

Let’s look at the chart between 2000 and 2020, the last two decades. The home loan market in the country before that was too small and evolving and hence, prone to extreme results. So, it makes sense to ignore that data.

What does the chart tell us? It tells us that affordability of homes in the country has gone up over the years. The chart defines affordability as home price divided by the annual income of the individual buying the home.

In 2020, the average home price has stood at around Rs 50 lakh. Against this, the average annual income of the individual buying the home stands at around Rs 15 lakh. Given this, the affordability factor is at 3.3 (Rs 50 lakh divided by Rs 15 lakh).

Hence, the average individual in 2020 is buying a home which is priced at 3.3 times his annual income. (Please keep in mind that the property prices are represented on the left-axis and the annual income is represented on the right axis).

As can be seen from the chart, the affordability factor at 3.3 is the lowest in twenty years. Hence, affordability of homes has gone up. QED.

The trouble is, this goes totally against what we see, hear and feel all around us. Real estate companies have lakhs of unsold homes with absolutely no takers. They have thousands of crore of unpaid loans. The banks and non-banking finance companies (NBFCs) have restructured these loans over the years and not recognized them as bad loans in the process, with more than a little help from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). Bad loans are loans which haven’t been repaid for a period of 90 days or more.

Further, investors who bought real estate over the years have been finding it difficult to sell it. Indeed, if homes had become more affordable, this wouldn’t have been the case. Real estate companies would have been able to sell homes and repay the loans they have taken from banks and NBFCs. And the RBI wouldn’t have to intervene.

So, what is it that HDFC can see that we can’t? Before I get around to answering this question, let me tell you a little story. During the Second World War, the British Royal Air Force (RAF) had a peculiar problem.

It wanted to attach heavy plating to its airplanes in order to protect them from gunfire from the German anti-aircraft guns as well as fighter planes. The trouble was that these plates were heavy and hence, had to be attached strategically at points where bullets fired by the German guns were most likely to hit. The British couldn’t plate the entire plane or even large parts of it.

The good part was that they had historical data regarding which parts of the plane did the German bullets actually hit. And this is where things got interesting. As Jordan Ellenberg writes in How Not to Be Wrong: The Hidden Maths of Everyday Life: “The damage [of the bullets] wasn’t uniformly distributed across the aircraft. There were more bullet holes in the fuselage, not so many in the engines.”

So, historical data was available and hence, the decision should have turned out to be a very easy one. The plates needed to be attached around the plane’s fuselage. But this logic was missing something very basic. The German bullets should have been hitting the engines of airplanes more regularly than the historical evidence suggested, simply because the engine “is a point of total vulnerability”.

A statistician named Abraham Wald realised where the problem was. As Ellenberg writes: “The armour, said Wald, doesn’t go where bullet holes are. It goes where bullet holes aren’t: on the engines. Wald’s insight was simply to ask: where are the missing holes? The ones that would have been all over the engine casing, if the damage had been spread equally all over the plane. The missing bullet holes were on the missing planes. The reason planes were coming back with fewer hits to the engine is that planes that got hit in the engine weren’t coming back.” They simply crashed.

This is what is called survivorship bias or the data that remains and then we make a decision based on it.

As Gary Smith writes in Standard Deviations: Flawed Assumptions Tortured Data and Other Ways to Lie With Statistics: “Wald…had the insight to recognize that these data suffered from survivor bias…Instead of reinforcing the locations with the most holes, they should reinforce the locations with no holes.”

Wald’s recommendations were implemented and ended up saving many planes which would have otherwise gone down. (On a different note, both the books from which I have quoted above, are excellent books on how not to use data, especially useful if you are in the business of torturing data to make it say what you want ).

If you are still scratching your head and wondering what does this Second World War story have to do with HDFC finding homes more affordable, allow me to explain. Like the British before Wald came in with his explanation, HDFC is also looking at the data it has and not the overall data.

Look at the left-hand of the corner of the chart, it says based on customer data. The analysis is based on HDFC’s own historical customer data. When HDFC talks about an average home price of Rs 50 lakh and an income of Rs 15 lakh, it is basically talking about the set of people who have approached the HFC for a loan and gotten one. Hence, HDFC’s conclusion of better affordability is drawn from the sample it has access to.

But does this really mean that affordability has improved? Or does it mean that the quality of HDFC’s customers has improved over the years? The customers that HDFC is giving a home loan to are ones who can afford to buy homes. The HFC clearly has no idea about people who want to buy homes but simply do not have the financial resources to do so.

They don’t show up as a part of any sample, hence, the evidence on them is at best anecdotal. These people are like planes whose engines were hit and hence, they did not make it back to their base, in the Second World War. And like there was no data on the planes which got hit and didn’t make it back, there is no data on these people as well. Basically, HDFC’s data and conclusion are victims of the survivorship bias

In fact, HDFC’s investor presentation has always carried another interesting slide on low penetration of home loans in India. The following chart is from the latest presentation.


Home loans as a percentage of GDP

Source: HDFC Investor Presentation, June 30, 2020.

Total home loans outstanding given by both banks and HFCs in 2020 stands at 10% of the GDP (On a slightly different note, the ratio of homes loans given by banks to home loans given by HFCs is 64:36). In March 2014, the total outstanding home loans in India had stood at 9% of the GDP. If homes indeed were affordable this ratio would have gone up faster.

To conclude, it’s time that HDFC remove this misleading slide from its investor presentation or at least say that the affordability has improved for its customers and not for the country as a whole.

Here’s Why the Biggest Crib of Real Estate Companies is a Big Lie

India-Real-Estate-Market

Earlier this month, Raghuram Rajan, the governor of the Reserve Bank of India(RBI) presented the second monetary policy statement for 2016-2017. Rajan decided to keep the repo rate at 6.5%.  Repo rate is the rate at which RBI lends to banks and acts as a sort of a benchmark to the interest rates that banks pay for their deposits and in turn charge on their loans.

The real estate lobby Confederation of Real Estate Developers’ Associations of India (CREDAI) wasn’t happy with this. As C Shekar Reddy, ex-president and national executive member of CREDAI told The New Indian Express: “Banks are charging 9.50 pc or more interest on home loans. People will be motivated to buy homes if the loan interest rates are lowered. All our representations to banks to cut the interests rates to give a fillip to the struggling housing sector have gone in vain. Whenever we approached the banks earlier, they said they would think of reducing interest rates if RBI did so with its policy rates.”

Similar statements were made by other CREDAI officials as well. As Geetambar Anand, the president of CREDAI told the Press Trust of India: “It was on expected lines. Now, banks should be advised to reduce interest on home loans by another 50 basis points.” One basis point is one hundredth of a percentage.

The basic point being made is that the RBI has kept the repo rate too high. As the repo rate is high, the interest rate charged by banks on home loans are high. As interest on home loans is high, people are not buying homes. As people are not buying homes, real estate companies are suffering. Or as SARE Homes MD Vineet Relia told PTI: “Since demand in real estate and allied industries remains sluggish, a rate cut could have improved liquidity and created renewed interest in property purchase.”

While all this sounds quite logical, it isn’t correct. Every month, the Reserve Bank of India releases the sectoral deployment of credit data. This data essentially gives out the total amount of lending carried out by banks to different sectors. And this includes home loans given out for the purchase of homes.

In the last one year (actually it’s a period slightly greater than a year, between April 17, 2015 and April 29, 2016), the overall lending of banks (i.e. non-food credit) has grown by just 8.4%. As I explained in yesterday’s column, this has happened primarily because banks have more or less stopped making fresh loans to industry.

Nevertheless, the retail loans of banks have grown at a very good pace, over the last one year. The retail loans include home loans, vehicle loans, education loans, credit card outstanding, loans against fixed deposits, loans against shares/bonds, and personal loans.

The overall growth of retail loans in the last one year stood at 19.7%. This had stood at 15.7% between April 2014 and April 2015. The home loans given out by banks have also seen a fairly robust growth. Home loans grew by 18.1% to Rs 7,58,203 crore, over the last one year. They had grown by 17.1% between April 2014 and April 2015.

Things become a little more interesting if we look at this data in a little more detail. The RBI gives also gives data on priority sector home loans. As per the Master Circular issued by the RBI in July 2014, priority sector home loans are essentially loans to individuals up to Rs 25 lakh in metropolitan centres with population above ten lakh and Rs 15 lakh in other centres.

The home loans given under the priority sector lending that banks need to carry out, grew by 7.6%, over the last one year. They had grown by 4.4% between April 2014 and April 2015.

As far as the non-priority sector home loans (home loans greater than Rs 25 lakh in centres with a population of above 10 lakh and greater than Rs 15 lakh in other centres), are concerned, they grew by a whopping 28.6%, in the last one year. The loans had grown by 33% between April 2014 and April 2015.

What does this tell us? The priority sector home loans are not growing because there are very few real estate markets in the country which banks service, where homes of up to Rs 15 lakh or Rs 25 lakh are available. The growth in priority sector home loan lending has been even slower than the overall bank lending growth.

In fact, in April 2014, priority sector home loans, made up for 56% of total home loans. By April 2015, this was down to 50%. And in April 2016, this stood at 45%. This is definitive evidence of the high real estate prices that continue to prevail in this country, despite what real estate builders keep telling us.

As far as non-priority sector home loans are concerned, they have grown by close to 29% over the last one year, after growing by 33% between April 2014 and April 2015. And that is a pretty good rate of growth, when overall lending growth is 8.4%, and retail lending growth is 19.7%. So what are the builders really complaining about?

I think what seems to be happening is that the home buyers are no longer buying under-construction homes. I have no way of verifying this through data. But that is what the data along with the builders cribbing all the time about the RBI, seems to suggest.

Over the last few years, many builders haven’t delivered homes on time. This has led to a situation where many individuals have had to pay the pre EMI along with the rent as well. Some people I know are even paying their EMIs along with their rents. (I don’t know how EMIs have started without possession of the home being taken).

Some builders have disappeared as well, after taking money from home buyers. Hence, homebuyers are staying away from under-construction property is what my analysis seems to suggest. It seems the buyers are now buying completed homes, which is where the home loans taken are basically going. This can mean that investors who had bought homes in the past are now selling out. It could also mean that builders who had completed inventory are selling it now.

This has hit the entire business model of the real estate developers, who raise money from prospective buyers, when they start building, without putting much of their own capital at risk. But then, for this, they have no one but themselves to blame.

The column originally appeared in the Vivek Kaul Diary on June 16, 2016

One idea that real estate companies want to borrow from Gulzar

Gulzar
In the film Ek Thi Dayan, lyricist Gulzar wrote a song, which had the following line: “koi khabar aayi na pasand to end badal denge [if we don’t like some bit of news, we will change the end.] In the recent past, the real estate companies do not seem to have liked the bad news that has been read out to them. And to tackle that they plan to create their own news. Or at least that is what a recent development suggests.

The Confederation of Real Estate Developers Association of India (CREDAI), a lobby of real estate companies, which has about 10,000 members, now plans to collect its own data on the industry.

As President of CREDAI Geetamber Anand told Business Standard: “The need to come up with its own set of data cropped up after varying figures from real estate consultants including Knight Frank, JLL India, Liases Foras and others, which at times create panic amongst the buyers fraternity.”

A spate of research reports brought out by real estate consultants in the recent past has suggested that real estate developers in large cities are not able to sell homes that they have built. A recent research report by Knight Frank suggested that over 7 lakh homes were unsold in the top eight cities of the country. The report also estimated that it would take more than three years to sell homes that have piled up.

Other real estate consultants have come up with similar reports with similar numbers. This is something which has not gone down well with the real estate lobby, which now wants to put out its own data. How can someone else tell them that all is not well with them?

What has also not gone down well with them is a recent comment by the Reserve Bank of India governor Raghuram Rajan, asking them to bring down prices.

As Rajan said: “It would be a “great help” if realty developers sitting on unsold stock bring down prices…Once the prices stabilise, more people will be keen to buy houses…I think we need the market to clear.”

The CREDAI responded to Rajan with the following statement: “While we respect the RBI governors concern for kick starting the real estate sector, it would be prudent to say that from the developers side a substantial reduction in prices has already happened across the country [italics are mine] and any further decrease in sale prices would be a deterrent for the growth of a sector that contributes so much to the economy and employment at large.”

CREDAI President Anand told PTI that “housing prices have gone down by 15-20 per cent on an average in last two years across India, while input costs have risen by 15-20 per cent.” The good bit here is that here is a top real estate lobbyist admitting that prices have fallen. It is tough to get them to admit even this much. Nevertheless, if the reduction in prices has already happened, why there is an inventory of 7 lakh unsold homes across top 8 cities? Also, the total number of unsold homes all across the country would be much higher than 7 lakh, but no such data is complied.

The real estate companies need to go back and learn some basic economics. One of the most basic laws in economics is the law of demand. The law essentially states that there is an inverse relationship between the price of a product and the quantity demand by consumers. If the price of the product goes up, demand falls and if the price of a product falls, the demand goes up.

In case of the real estate sector in India what the law of demand tells us is that if prices had fallen enough, people would have bought homes to live in and the unsold inventory would have cleared out. Nobody likes to let go of a good deal. But that hasn’t happened.

Why? Some simple Maths should explain this. In the National Capital Territory (Delhi and other smaller cities around it) an average flat costs around Rs 75 lakh (most research reports agree on this number). Assuming 20% of the price has to be paid in black (and I am being extremely conservative here), the official price of the flat is Rs 60 lakh (80% of Rs 75 lakh). A bank or a housing finance company gives a loan against this price.

The housing finance company HDFC has a loan to value ratio of 65%. This means it gives 65% of the value of a home as a loan on an average. This would mean that HDFC would give a loan of Rs 39 lakh. The buyer would have make Rs 21 lakh as a down-payment. He also needs to raise another Rs 15 lakh to be paid in black.

Hence, the buyer would need to raise Rs 36 lakh (Rs 21 lakh down-payment and Rs 15 lakh black) on his own. How many people have that capacity even in a city like Delhi? And I am not even taking into account the cost of furnishing the house, the cost of moving into it, other expenses like stamp duty etc.

The same maths works for all other big cities as well. What this clearly tells us is that home prices are way beyond what most people can afford. They are in a bubble zone. The sooner the real estate companies understand this, the better it will be for all of us.

They may want a different end, but that isn’t going to happen. The longer they hold on to prices, the longer they will have to hold on to all the inventory that has piled up.

The column was originally published on Sep 8, 2015 in The Daily Reckoning

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

As bank loans to real estate companies grow, an average Mumbaikar needs 34 years income to buy a home

India-Real-Estate-Market

Vivek Kaul
The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) releases the sectoral deployment of credit data towards the end of every month. Data released on September 29, 2014, throws up some really interesting numbers.
Between August 23, 2013 and August 22, 2014, the overall lending by banks grew by 10.2% to Rs 5,729,300 crore.
Between August 24, 2012 and August 23, 2013, the overall bank lending had grown by 16.8% to Rs 5,199,100 crore. Hence, the growth in overall bank lending has slowed down considerably over the last one year.
What are the reasons for the same? A reason offered by banks is that the borrowing has slowed down because of the high interest rates that prevail. But interest rates had been high even around the time same time last year. Nevertheless, the overall lending by banks had still grown by 16.8%. So high interest rates cannot be a reason be the only reason for bank lending slowing down considerably.
A more feasible reason is the increase in non-performing loans of banks. As on March 31, 2013, the gross non-performing loans of public sector banks had stood at 3.61% of total loans. In a recent report ICRA points out that the gross non performing loans of public sector banks is expected to rise to the region of 4.4-4.7% of total loans as on March 31, 2015.
This rise in non-performing loans could be a reason behind banks going slow on giving out loans. They don’t want to see more loans go bad, and hence, have decided to go slow on lending. Nevertheless, the slowdown doesn’t seem to have impacted one particular sector and that is, commercial real estate.
Between August 23, 2013 and August 22, 2014, the lending to the sector grew by 17.6%. to Rs 1,59,900 crore. Between August 24, 2012 and August 23, 2013, the lending to the sector had grown at a similar rate of 17.4% to Rs 1,36,000 crore.
So, the question to ask here is why has the lending to commercial real estate continued to grow at the same rate whereas the growth in overall lending has fallen dramatically? This, under a scenario where real estate companies have a huge inventory of unsold homes all over the country. (To read about this in detail click here and here).
There is no straight forward answer to this question. To make a definitive statement on this, one would need the break up of the amount of lending to commercial real estate by public sector banks and private sector banks. It would be interesting to see the growth in lending to this sector by public sector banks.
As I have mentioned in the past most Indian real estate companies are fronts for the ill-gotten wealth of politicians. And a possible explanation for the lending to commercial real estate continuing to grow at the same rate as it had last year can be that politicians have been forcing public sector banks to continue to lend to real estate companies.
This continued lending has helped real estate companies to continue repaying their old loans to banks. This has allowed real estate companies to not cut prices on their unsold homes. If bank loans had not been so forthcoming, the real estate companies would have to sell off their existing inventory to repay their bank loans. And in order to do that they would have to cut prices.
In fact, there is nothing new about this modus operandi. Ajit Dayal, an investment manager and the founder of Quantum Asset Management Company had made a similar point in a column in October 2009: “Banks have used your money[i.e. depositors’ money] to give it as a loan to real estate developers. Their act of giving the loan to real estate developers gives them badly needed cash. The real estate developers no longer need to sell their real estate to get “cash flow” to stay alive. They got the money from the banks.”
These loans have allowed enough leeway to real estate companies to launch more new projects. As an article in The Financial Express points out “With more than a hundred launches, across the top real estate markets in Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore and Pune, and attractively-priced offerings, it could turn out to be a cracker of a Diwali for developers.”
As mentioned earlier, the fresh loans from banks has allowed real estate companies to not cut prices. This, despite the fact that they have a huge inventory of unsold homes. In fact, a July 2014 report in The Times of India quotes Pankaj Kapoor of property research firm Liases Foras as saying “In Mumbai, the average cost of a flat is Rs 1.2 crore.”
An estimate made by Forbes put the average income of a Mumbaikar at $5900 or around Rs 3.54 lakh (assuming $1 = Rs 60) per year. This means it would need nearly 34 years of annual income (Rs 1.2 crore divided Rs 3.54 lakh) for an average Mumbaikar to buy a home in this city currently. What this tells us very broadly that homes in Mumbai are very expensive. Similar calculations done for other parts of the country are most likely to show similar results, though probably the situation might be a little better in other cities.
Nevertheless, the real estate companies never get tired of giving us other reasons. One favourite reason often offered is that people are not buying homes because interest rates are very high. This reason was offered yesterday as well, after the RBI decided to keep the repo rate at 8%. Repo rate is the rate at which RBI lends to banks.
The Confederation of Real Estate Developers’ Associations of India, a real estate lobby, said in a statement yesterday that it was “disappointed with the status quo on the RBI policy rates and demands a reduction in interest rates to facilitate lowering of entry barrier and spur demand for the real estate sector.”
Well, even if the RBI were to cut interest rates by 50-100 basis points (one basis point is one hundredth of a percentage) how would it help in home sales, is beyond my understanding.
So what is a reasonable home price to annual income ratio? An April 2013 article in Forbes points out that “The price-to-income ratio looks at the total cost/price of a home relative to median annual incomes. Historically, the typical, median home in the U.S. cost 2.6 times as much as the median annual income (so if the median income in an area was $100,000, the median price of a home would typically be about $260,000: $100,000 * 2.6).”
A similar scenario emerges in Great Britain as well. A January 2014 article on www.economicshelp.org points out that “First time buyers in London are seeing house prices at a record 7.5 times average earnings. For the UK as a whole, the ratio of 4.3 is still above long term trends.” In comparison, if it takes 34 years of annual income to buy a home, what it clearly means is that the real estate companies have clearly priced themselves out of the market.
But this is something they really won’t want to believe because now they are used to the high prices that have commanded over the last few years.
The article appeared originally on www.FirstBiz.com on Oct 1, 2014

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