Real Estate

Properties shouldn’t get expensive: Real estate consultants are just rigging home prices

India-Real-Estate-Market

Vivek Kaul

The American author Upton Sinclair once said that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
This seems to be true about the “so called” real estate consultants who operate in this country. Their main job it seems is to bring out a research report every few months, where the conclusion is that “real estate prices will continue to go up”.
This despite the fact when their own data contradicts this conclusion. Let’s take the case of a recent research report titled India Real Estate Outlook brought out by Knight Frank. The report takes a look at the real estate scenario prevailing across some of the biggest cities in India.
In the case of Mumbai, the report points out that there is a huge demand-supply gap. The unsold inventory of residential apartments in the city stands at 2,13,742 units. In June 2014, the quarters-to-sell ratio stood at 12.
“Quarters-to-sell(QTS) can be explained as the number of quarters required to exhaust the existing unsold inventory in the market. The existing unsold inventory is divided by the average sales velocity of the preceding eight quarters in order to arrive at the QTS number for that particular quarter,” the report points out.
What this means is that it will take close to three years to exhaust the existing number of unsold residential apartments in Mumbai, if people continue to buy homes at the rate they have been in the preceding two years. What is interesting is that the unsold inventory has gone up dramatically over the last few years. In December 2011 the number had stood at five, the report points out. This means that in December 2011, it would have taken around one year and three months to dispose of the inventory of unsold residential apartments in Mumbai. By June 2014, the number had increased to three years.
What this tells us is that the supply of residential apartments in Mumbai is substantially more than their demand. And anyone who understands basic economics will know that in order to clear this inventory the real estate companies need to cut prices, so that people come out and buy these unsold apartments.
Nevertheless, the Knight Frank report goes around to conclude that “On the residential price front…the forecasted increase for the entire year (2014) is 10.1%.” It goes on to explain the reasons for this forecast. “This period [the first six months of 2014] has seen significant completion of transit infrastructure that has the potential to alter the dynamics of the region’s property market,” the report points out. The Versova-Ghatkpoar Metro, the Eastern Freeway and the Santacruz-Chembur Link Road are some of these projects.
The report writers forget(or rather ignore) a rather fundamental point here about how markets operate. Markets start factoring in information well in advance. They don’t wait for a particular development to be completed before factoring in that information into the price. An excellent example of this are the real estate prices in parts of Navi Mumbai, which are close to the proposed new airport. The airport is nowhere in the picture, but prices have been driven up for years, around this story.
Hence, the infrastructure that the report points out to, has already been there in the minds of people for a while now. And if they had been so impressed by it, they would be buying homes, and the quarters-to-sell ratio would have come down. Now that as the report points out, hasn’t happened, making the point irrelevant. Another reason, which is a favourite with most research report writers these days, has also been offered. Now that Narendra Modi is in power, things will improve and people will buy more homes.
As mathematician John Allen Paulos writes A Mathematician Plays the Stock Market “Because so much information is available…something insightful sounding can always be said.” But what sounds insightful need not be correct.
The question that the research report does not answer is: why have the real estate prices in Mumbai going up, despite the fact that people haven’t been buying residential apartments. The Residex Index of National Housing Bank points out that real estate prices in Mumbai have risen by 18.7% between the end of December 2011 and March 2014. This despite the fact that the inventory of unsold residential homes has been growing dramatically. In this scenario, where people are not buying as many homes as are being produced, prices should have been falling and not going up.
The reason for this is straightforward. The real estate market in India is rigged in favour of real estate companies and politicians who are the real owners of these companies. 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.
And these politicians and their real estate companies have an incentive in holding the prices to be high. They operate as a cartel to do that. Of course, no real estate consultant can “afford” to talk about these reasons given that they make their money from real estate companies. And real estate companies would want its consultants to keep constantly mouthing the lines that “prices will
continue to go up”. The research reports brought out by these real estate consultants play precisely that role. They help in managing the price expectations in the minds of prospective buyers.
Whenever such a report is released, its splashed all over the media. The media, in turn, because it depends on advertising from real estate companies, tends to highlight the price escalation and the sales will increase part (or they just don’t bother to read beyond the press release). They don’t bother to ask the most fundamental question: If there is so much inventory, why are prices going up? Take the case of South Mumbai. As the report points out “the inventory level in the South Mumbai market will take the maximum time of 18 quarters (4.5 years) to sell. The age of inventory, calculated as the time elapsed since launch, is also the longest, at 15 quarters.” So why are prices still rising is something that no one has bothered to ask?
This is how real estate consultants help real estate companies manage price expectations in the minds of prospective consumers. So, the next time you read a report saying real estate prices will go up, check for the source. If a real estate consultant is saying so, the information needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. 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—the insiders have managed to take all of us for a ride.

The article originally appeared on www.Firstbiz.com on Aug 30, 2014

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

Borrow less, don’t blame RBI: Time Jaitley stops doing a Chidu on us

Fostering Public Leadership - World Economic Forum - India Economic Summit 2010Vivek Kaul

A favourite pastime of former finance minister P Chidambaram other than telling us that the Indian economic growth was about to bounce back, was to ask the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) to cut interest rates.
The new finance minister Arun Jaitley has carried on from where Chidambaram left. On August 10, Jaitley had nudged the RBI to cut interest rates after taking various factors into account.

The thing with most politicians is that either they do not understand how a market operates or they pretend otherwise. Jaitley and Chidambaram, I assume would fall into the latter category. Allow me to explain.
The latest RBI annual report points out that “the household financial saving rate remained low during 2013-14, increasing only marginally to 7.2 per cent of GDP in 2013-14 from 7.1 per cent of GDP in 2012-13 and 7.0 per cent of GDP in 2011-12…the household financial saving rate [has] dipped sharply from 12 per cent in 2009-10.”
Household financial savings is essentially the money invested by individuals in fixed deposits, small savings scheme, mutual funds, shares, insurance etc. The household financial savings were at 12% of the GDP in 2009-10. Since then, they have fallen dramatically to 7.2% in 2013-14. A major reason for the fall has been the high inflation that has prevailed since 2008.
This has had two impacts. One is that expenses of people have consistently gone up, leading to lower savings. Further, of the money that was saved a higher proportion was directed towards physical savings like gold and real estate. This was done because the rate of return available on financial savings was much lower than the rate of return on gold as well as real estate. The average savings in physical assets between 2005-06 and 2007-08 stood at 11.4% of the GDP. This shot up to 14.8% in 2012-13(the data for 2013-14 is not available).
What has not helped is the fact that over the last few years the fiscal deficit of the government shot up dramatically, as its expenditure shot up at a much faster rate, in comparison its income. Fiscal deficit of the government is the difference between what it earns and what it spends. This increase in fiscal deficit was financed through increased borrowing.
In fact, buried in the second chapter of the Economic Survey of 2013-2014 is a very interesting data point. In 2012-2013, the household financial savings amounted to 7.1% of the GDP. The government borrowing stood at 7% of the GDP. A similar comparison for 2013-2014 is not available yet. Nevertheless, it would be safe to assume that it won’t be materially different from the 2012-2013 comparison.
The conclusion that one can draw from this is that entire household financial savings were used up to fund the fiscal deficit. This is also reflected in the following table from the Economic Survey.
average cost of borrowing
As the government borrowed more and more, eating up into the household financial savings, the cost of its borrowing also went up. In 2009-10, the average cost of borrowing stood at 7.5%. By 2013-2014, this number had shot up to 8.3%.
Lending to the government is the safest form of lending. Hence, the rate of interest that the government pays on its borrowing becomes the benchmark for all other kind of loans. Also, with greater borrowing, it left a lower amount of money available for others outside the government to borrow. As the Economic Survey pointed out “In recent years, with a decline in the savings rate and an enlarged fiscal deficit, the external capital from outside the firm, available to the private sector has declined.”
So, with the government paying a higher rate of interest on its debt, and not enough money going around for others (which included banks) to borrow, it isn’t surprising that you and I had higher EMIs to pay.
To cut a long story short, if interest rates need to come down, the government needs to borrow less. If the government has to borrow less, it needs to spend less or try and increase its income. If this happens, there will be more money going around for everyone else to borrow, and will lead to a fall in interest rates.
Unless these things happen, any call by the finance minister asking the RBI to cut interest rates needs to be taken with a pinch of salt. The RBI may decide to humour the finance minister and go ahead and cut the repo rate (the rate at which it lends to banks). Nevertheless, any material fall in interest rates will happen only once the government is able to make serious efforts towards curtailing the fiscal deficit.
And the next time you hear Jaitley asking the RBI to cut interest rates, remember, he is trying to do a Chidambaram on us.

The article originally appeared on www.Firstbiz.com on August 23, 2014

How banks help keep real estate prices high

 India-Real-Estate-MarketVivek Kaul
 John Maynard Keynes, the greatest economist of the twentieth century, once remarked “markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” In simple English, one of the interpretations of this statement is that the bubbles can keep running for a very long period of time.
The Indian real estate sector is an excellent example of the same. It has been a bubble for the last few years now, but hasn’t burst.
Before we go any further it is important to define the word ‘bubble’. The Financial Times Lexicon defines an asset bubble as follows: “When the prices of securities or other assets rise so sharply and at such a sustained rate that they exceed valuations justified by fundamentals, making a sudden collapse likely – at which point the bubble bursts.”
The problem with this definition is that no one really knows when the bubble will burst. The fundamentals may point out to the fact that the bubble might burst any time soon, but that may or may not happen.
Lets try and understand this in the context of Indian real estate. How good are the fundamentals? It is a well known fact that real estate companies are having a tough time trying to sell homes they have already built up (or what in technical terms is referred to as inventory). As a November 2013 report of Colliers International points out “Pressures of increasing unsold inventory and a liquidity crunch resulted in fewer project launches. There was an increase in the incentives being offered to sell property, such as easy payment plans, discounts and free gifts with bookings.”
So homes in projects that have already been built up are lying unsold. And the number of new projects being launched have come down. As a December 2013 report in the Business Standard points out “New property launches in the residential segment across cities declined 12 per cent in the year, with Chennai recording the sharpest drop at 39 per cent, followed by the National Capital Region at 33 per cent and Pune at 20 per cent, according to a report by Cushman & Wakefield. Mumbai recorded just 6 per cent growth in launches.”
What this tells us is that the demand for real estate has slowed down. So, why aren’t prices coming down is the logical question to ask? One reason is the fact that a lot of homes that have already been bought have been bought by investors, who are in no hurry to sell out. Shashank Jain executive director, PwC India explained this point in a recent interview to the Daily News and Analysis (DNA). He said that investors are largely of two types—those looking to deploy black money—and senior executives looking to invest in their in a second or third home.
“One, the business community with an element of unaccounted surplus being parked in realty. The government is trying to control them by imposing TDS (tax deducted at source) of 1% on an amount of Rs50 lakh and more. Two, a significant chunk of investment is made by white collar executives, especially in the metro micro markets. This class of investors is putting its surplus income in a second or third home. They don’t have exit pressure. That again means that prices will not come down significantly,” said Jain.
This explains to some extent why real estate prices are not falling. But it does not explain why real estate companies are not cutting prices to get rid of their surplus inventory. It only explains why investors are holding on to homes they have already bought.
It is important to understand that any bubble keeps running till money keeps coming into it. Between 2005 and 2012, a lot of money came into real estate through the private equity route. As Manish Bhandari of Vallum Capital writes in a report titled The End game of speculation in Indian Real Estate has begun “Private Equity investments drove in hordes after opening of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in real estate sector in the year 2005. The high structural growth story of India attracted a lot of private equity capital the in real estate industry during the Yr 2005-2012, with major inflows coming in the Year 2007-09. Close to $US 20 bn of inflow came to into real estate & construction business, which has put the prices on steroids.”
So, over a period of time, money coming in from the private equity investors has kept real estate prices high. But as Bhandari says private equity inflows peaked during the period 2007 to 2009. There has to be a more recent reason for real estate prices not falling.
The answer lies in some interesting data provided by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI). Between November 30, 2012 and November 29, 2013, the total loans given by banks (excluding food credit) grew by 14.7%. During the same period loans given to commercial real estate grew by a much faster 19.1%. This, in an environment where real estate companies have huge inventories and the launch of new projects has slowed down considerably. So, why are banks lending money to real estate companies? And what are real estate companies doing with that money?
The only possible explanation is that banks are essentially giving fresh loans to real estate companies so that the companies can repay their old loans. This has allowed real estate companies to not cut prices on their unsold inventory. 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.
But that hasn’t happened. Interestingly, between November 2008 and November 2013, total loans given by banks (excluding food credit) grew by 57.4%. During the same period lending to commercial real estate grew by 86.2%.
And this is what has kept real estate prices high. As Pankaj Kapoor, owner and managing director, Liases Foras, a real estate rating and research firm, told Business Today recently “if capital availability becomes difficult, developers may have to cut prices to push sales.”
It is also worth remembering that the average life of a private equity fund is seven to eight years. And all that money that private equity investors have brought in over the last few years, will now have to be returned by real estate companies. In order to do that real estate companies will have to sell the existing inventory that they have piled up.
As Bhandari points out “With the average life of private equity fund being around 7-8 years, the Year 2013 marks the beginning of private equity returning back to shores. The imperative is to see down inventory and return the capital back to investors…The exit of private equity, a fair weather friend of developer, is going to create distress sale situation in real estate industry, shortly. This would lead to depressing price situation for the next 18 months, scaring further fund raising in this sector.”
Another factor that could work towards real estate prices falling are the impending Lok Sabha elections. A lot of black money of politicians is locked up in real estate. And this will have to be unlocked in order to get money to fight elections. As Bhandari points out “According to various estimates an election for central government can cost upwards of US$ 5-6 bn, while average state government elections costing around one billion dollar. With impending central and state election in ten states, costing around US $15 bn, Real Estate will witness outflow of money to fund these elections over the next 18 months.” A similar trend played out before the 2009 Lok Sabha elections when prices fell by around 20% in many markets. But that was also an impact of the start of the current financial crisis with the investment bank Lehman Brothers going bust.
Whether this happens again remains to be seen, simply because as Keynes said ““markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”
 The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on January 7, 2014
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek) 
 

Only in black: This example shows all that is wrong with Indian real estate

India-Real-Estate-MarketVivek Kaul
I had an interesting conversation with an relative of mine early last month.
This gentleman had bought a flat in the Delhi sub-city of Dwarka sometime in 2002 at a price of around Rs 25 lakh. The area was totally undeveloped at that point of time and hence property was going cheap.
More than a decade later the flat is now worth something around Rs 2 crore. The flat had been bought as an investment. My relative planned to sell the flat and use the money to meet the expenses of his daughter’s education (she wants to do an MBA/PhD from a good university in the United States) as well as her wedding.
The balance that remained after meeting his daughter’s expenses would go into his retirement fund, given that he has no plans of working beyond the age of 63-64.
During the course of our conversation I suggested to him that it would be a good idea to sell the flat and invest the money into different debt mutual funds. The logic being that Rs 2 crore was more than enough to meet his daughter’s education and wedding expenses and at the same time add to his retirement kitty.
So it made sense to preserve the Rs 2 crore that he had managed to accumulate by investing in the flat, rather than look for more gain. Also, by investing in debt funds, the return that he would earn would be similar to a fixed deposit but the after tax returns would much better given that he could take indexation into account while calculating his taxes. Indexation essentially allows the cost of purchase of a flat to be adjusted for inflation.
The after tax returns would be in the range of 7-8% and he could make a decent Rs 14-16 lakh every year, which would further compound, if he stayed invested.
He liked the idea and decided to sell his flat. Given that the flat was in a good society, he got several good offers. But even one month later he has not been able to sell the flat.
He called me yesterday and told me that he hadn’t been able to implement the plan I had suggested to him, around a month back. The reason for that was very simple. Although he had got offers from several buyers willing to buy the flat at Rs 2 crore, none of them were willing to pay him the entire amount in white, through a cheque. The buyers typically were ready to pay around Rs 80 lakh in cheque and the remaining Rs 1.2 crore in cash.
As mentioned earlier my relative had bought the flat at Rs 25 lakh, most of which was financed through a home loan. The remaining came from the savings he and his wife had put together. So all the money to buy the flat had been paid in ‘white’. He had been lucky given that the builder he had bought the flat from was building his first project and was more interested in offloading what he had built, rather than insist on being paid in black.
The property dealers my relative had been dealing with to sell the flat had clearly told him that if he wanted the entire Rs 2 crore to be paid in cheque, then he could more or less forget about selling the flat. At best, they could get a buyer who would pay upto Rs 1 crore in cheque, the remaining Rs 1 crore would be paid in cash.
For someone who has largely lead an honest life, he couldn’t figure out how would he would go around handling cash to the tune of Rs 1 crore. The brokers had a solution for this as well. They could help him buy gold bars. Or if he was willing to bet his money on real estate again, they could showcase some projects coming up on the outskirts of Gurgaon or on the way to Agra. Maybe he could buy two flats there, they suggested. And if he found all this too risky, he could simply store away the money in a couple of bank lockers. Even that could be arranged for, it was suggested.
My relative’s situation is a very good example of all that is wrong with the Indian estate real system as it has evolved. Since a major part of the transaction is in black, the cash that is thus generated needs to be put to use in some way. Just putting it away in a locker isn’t really a solution.
Money needs to keep growing. The amount paid in black can also be used to buy more real estate. For a flat which costs Rs 80 lakh, half the money i.e. Rs 40 lakh, needs to be paid through a cheque, and the remaining Rs 40 lakh can be paid in cash, brokers suggested to my relative.
This also means that Rs 40 lakh of the Rs 1 crore that my relative had received in white would be put to use and become tax free. The law gives a tax payers two years from the date of the sale to invest in another ‘residential’ property. If the property is under construction, a period of three years is allowed. The amount invested becomes tax free.
As mentioned earlier Rs 40 lakh of the Rs 1 crore received in black, would be utilised to buy a flat. That means Rs 60 lakh would still remain. This can be used to buy gold. Gold can be easily stored and hidden.
The point is if a real estate investor wants to sell his property, he has to be ready to receive payment in black. If he doesn’t want to be paid in black, it will be very difficult for him to sell his property. Once he has sold the property and received the money, he needs to put the ‘black’ money to use again.
This means buying more real estate in an up and coming location, where the prices are low. And so the cycle of black money continues with investors selling to each other, driving up prices and making real estate unaffordable for those who want to buy a ‘home’ to live in.
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on August 2, 2013 
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek) 

Japan to India: Busting the biggest myth of investing in real estate

India-Real-Estate-MarketVivek Kaul 
Japan saw the mother of all real estate bubbles in the 1980s. Banks were falling over one another to give out loans and home and land prices reached astonishingly high levels. As Paul Krugman points out in The Return of Depression Economics “Land, never cheap in crowded Japan, had become incredibly expensive: according to a widely cited factoid, the land underneath the square mile of Tokyo’s Imperial Palace was worth more than the entire state of California.”
As prices kept going up, the Japanese started to believe that the real estate boom will carry on endlessly. In fact such was the confidence in the boom that Japanese banks and financial institutions started to offer 100 year home loans and people lapped it up.
As Stephen D. King, the chief economist at HSBC, writes in his new book When the Money Runs Out “ By the end of the 1980s, it was not unusual to find Japanese home buyers taking out 100 year mortgages (or home loans), happy, it seems, to pass the burden on to their children and even their grand children. Creditors, meanwhile, naturally assumed the next generation would repay even if, in some cases, the offspring were no more a twinkle in their parents’ eyes. Why worry? After all, land prices, it seemed, only went up.”
Things started to change in late 1989, once the Bank of Japan, the Japanese central bank, started to raise interest rates to deflate the bubble. Land prices started to come down and there has been very little recovery till date, more than two decades later. “Since the 1989 peak…land prices have fallen by 60 per cent,” writes King.
Every bull market has a theory behind it. Real estate bull markets whenever and wherever they happen, are typically built around one theory or myth. Economist Robert Shiller explains this myth in The Subprime Solution – How Today’s Financial Crisis Happened and What to Do about It. Huge increases in real estate prices are built around “the myth that, because of population growth and economic growth, and with limited land resources available, the price of real estate must inevitably trend strongly upward through time,” writes Shiller
And the belief in this myth gives people the confidence that real estate prices will continue to go up forever. In Japan this led to people taking on 100 year home loans, confident that there children and grandchildren will continue to repay the EMI because they would benefit in the form of significantly higher home prices.
A similar sort of confidence was seen during the American real estate bubble of the 2000s. In a survey of home buyers carried out in Los Angeles in 2005, the prevailing belief was that prices will keep growing at the rate of 22% every year over the next 10 years. This meant that a house which cost a million dollars in 2005 would cost around $7.3million by 2015. Such was the belief in the bubble.
India is no different on this count. A recent survey carried out by industry lobby Assocham found that “over 85 per cent of urban working class prefer to invest in real estate saying it is likely to fetch them guaranteed and higher returns.” 
This is clearly an impact of real estate prices having gone up over the last decade at a very fast rate. The confidence that real estate will continue to give high guaranteed returns comes with the belief in the myth that because population is going up, and there is only so much of land going around, real estate prices will continue to go up.
But this logic doesn’t really hold. When it comes to density of population, India is ranked 33rd among all the countries in the world with an average of 382 people per square kilometre. Japan is ranked 38th with 337 people living per square kilometre. So as far as scarcity of land is concerned, India and Japan are more or less similarly placed. And if real estate prices could fall in Japan, even with the so called scarcity of land, they can in India as well.
Economist Ajay Shah in a recent piece in The Economic Times did some good number crunching to bust what he called the large population-shortage of land argument. As he wrote “A little arithmetic shows this is not the case. If you place 1.2 billion people in four-person homes of 1000 square feet each, and two workers of the family into office/factory space of 400 square feet, this requires roughly 1% of India’s land area assuming an FSI(floor space index) of 1. There is absolutely no shortage of land to house the great Indian population.”
The interesting thing is that large population-shortage of land is a story that real estate investors need to tell themselves. Even speculators need a story to justify why they are buying what they are buying.
Real estate prices have now reached astonishingly high levels. As a recent report brought out real estate consultancy firm Knight Frank points out, 29% of the homes under construction in Mumbai are priced over Rs 1 crore. In Delhi the number is at 11%. Such higher prices has led to a drop in home purchases and increasing inventory. “The inventory level has almost doubled in the last three years. In the National Capital Region, the inventory level reached 31 months at the end of March 2013 against 15 months at the end of March 2010, while in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region the inventory level has jumped from 17 months to 40 months. In Hyderabad, it reached 49 months in March 2013 as compared to 23 months in March 2010, according to data by real estate research firm Liases Foras. Inventory denotes the number of months required to clear the stock at the existing absorption rate. An efficient market maintains an inventory of eight to ten months,” a news report in the Business Standard points out.
The point is all bubble market stories work till a certain point of time. But when prices get too high common sense starts to gradually come back. In a stock market bubble when the common sense comes back the correction is instant and fast, because the market is very liquid. The same is not true about real estate, because one cannot sell a home as fast as one can sell stocks.
Real estate companies in India haven’t started cutting prices in a direct manner as yet. But there are loads of schemes and discounts on offer for anyone who is still willing to buy. As the Business Standard news report quoted earlier points out “As many as 500 projects across India are offering some scheme or the other, in a bid to push sales in an otherwise slow market. According to Magicbricks.com, an online property portal, Mumbai has the maximum number of projects with schemes/discounts at around 88, followed by Delhi with 56 and Chennai and Pune with 33 each. Kolkata has 30 such offers, while Hyderabad has 18 and Bangalore has 16. On a pan India level, Magicbricks has about 274 projects with discounts offer.”
Of course the big question is when will the real price cuts start? They will have to happen, sooner rather than later.
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on July 2, 2013
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)