Car sales for the month of February 2013 are down dramatically. For the month of February 2013 they fell by 25.71% to 1,58,513 units in comparison to the same month last year.
In this column yesterday, this writer argued that falling car sales is a reflection of the overall economy slowing down. People expect the bad times to either continue or to get even worse in the months to come. And this makes them hold onto the money they would have otherwise used to buy high cost items like a car. It also means that they do not want to commit to an EMI right now. Given these reasons car sales have slowed down.
The question that immediately cropped up was that if car sales are falling, using the same logic real estate sales should also be falling and that should lead to a fall in real estate prices. If cars are a big ticket purchase, then buying a house is the biggest expenditure that most people incur during their lifetime. Also the price of cars over the last few years hasn’t risen much whereas the price of homes has gone through the roof, making them terribly expensive.
So why are people ready to buy homes but not cars? The answer of course is not straightforward. But before I come to that allow me to deviate a little.
The economist George Akerlof wrote a research paper titled The Market for Lemons in 1970. For this paper, Akerlof ultimately received the Nobel Prize. In this paper he discusses the market for second hand cars (or used cars) and the problem people have in selling them.
Akerlof divided the second hand car market into two types of cars, peaches and lemons. Peaches were cars which were in a good shape where as lemons were cars which were in a bad shape. The individual selling the car obviously knows whether his car is a peach or a lemon but the individual buying the car doesn’t. So seller has what economists refer to as ‘insider information’ which the buyer doesn’t have.
The point is that in this transaction one side has much more information than the other side. So there is an asymmetry of information. As Nate Silver writes in The Signal and the Noise – The Art and the Science of Prediction “In a market plagued by asymmetries of information, the quality of goods will decrease and the market will be dominated by crooked sellers and gullible and desperate buyers.”
The real estate market in India is a tad like that. The sellers have all the information in the world and buyers have very little of it, almost next to nothing. And this manifests itself into situations which do not benefit the buyers at all.
Allow me to explain. Everyone talks about how real estate prices have been going up. This writer was recently told by someone that the flat he had bought in 2002 for around Rs 20-25 lakh was now going for Rs 2 crore. Fair point. But are there transactions happening at such an expensive price point? And if they are happening how are they in comparison to the past?
The point is that just looking at the price doesn’t give us the answer. One also has to look at the number of buyers looking to buy at that price point because only that can tell us how strong the trend is.
Unfortunately such kind of information is not available to most buyers in India. Hence, people who sell real estate, all the brokers and property dealers of the world, deal with buyers from a position of strength and always try to project a scenario where prospective homes are scarce. The buyers have no clue of whether deals are actually happening or not and hence tend to believe the brokers.
A real estate index which tell us the broad direction of the market would be a great thing to have. While attempts have been made in the past to launch a real estate index, nothing robust has come out till date.
There are reasons to believe that people are not buying as much real estate as they were in the past. This is not conclusive evidence but some evidence nevertheless. Try reading any newspaper article which makes a pitch for the Reserve Bank of India cutting interest rates, the CEOs of real estate companies come across as the most desperate of the lot. This tells you at some level that they are not selling as much as they are building. But how will an interest rate cut of 25-50 basis points (one basis point is one hundredth of a percentage) lead to people buying homes is beyond me.
Newspapers provide another indicator. Every week the front page of one newspaper or another has an advertisement for a new real estate launch happening somewhere, where the buyer has to put a minuscule portion of the cost of the home upfront. This money that is raised is typically used by the builder to payoff money that is due instead of building the homes that he has advertised. A story in The Carvan Magazine makes this point by quoting a property dealer : “If these builders were suddenly asked not to sell any more projects, I’m telling you, most of them couldn’t balance their books tomorrow.” So in effect most real estate companies are running Ponzi schemes where they are using money being brought in by the newer investors to pay off the older investors. As long as this Ponzi scheme keeps going real estate prices will continue to be high. If newer investors stop bringing in money, the builders will have to start selling the homes that they have built in order to pay off people who they owe money to.
Another interesting number is the proportion home loans form out of total loans given by banks. Home loans peaked at 12.9% of total banking credit in March 2006. As on December 28, 2012, they formed around 9.3% of total banking credit. And this in a scenario where housing prices have gone up many times between March 2006 and December 2012. Hence, it would only fair to assume that people are buying a fewer number of homes, at least by taking on home loans.
So if people are buying fewer homes why are the prices not falling? Those who work in the real estate industry would like us to believe that the cost of constructing a house has gone up. While that may be true to some extent the argument doesn’t justify the astonishing levels of price rise.
The material used in construction of a house and other forms of real estate was and continues to be easily available. Lumber which is used in large amounts is a renewable resource. Glass is made out of quartz, the second most common mineral on earth. Gypsum, which is the main constituent of plaster as well as wall board is very commonly available mineral. Cement is made out of limestone which forms 10% of all sedimentary rock formations on earth. (Source: The Subprime Solution by Robert Shiller). That leaves out the price of land on which the homes are constructed. We will just come to that.
A major reason for home prices not coming down despite the stagnant demand for homes is the fact that the market is dominated by investors/speculators and not real buyers who buy homes because they want to live in them. Anybody who has doubts about this can take a walk through the newer areas of the National Capital Territory. Most of the flats remain empty, giving an eerie feeling of a ghost town. All these flats are owned by investors/speculators. And it is these people who keep playing a game of passing the parcel among themselves and in a way ensure that prices of homes do not fall. Also they have made so much money in the past (and given that most of it is black money) they are in no hurry to sell these homes.
The story in The Caravan quotes a property dealer to make a similar point. “There isn’t a bubble of real homes…If all these apartments were actually built, and built fairly to schedule, I guarantee you that they would find real buyers. The demand is out there. But there is a huge bubble in imaginary homes—in homes that will be delayed indefinitely or just never get built.”
Also most of the black money in India finds its way into property one way or another. Most of the ill-gotten wealth of politicians is also deployed in property. And any fall in price of real estate would mean the value of their wealth coming down.
But at the end of the day there is only so much black money going around as well. What creates the illusion of the real estate prices continuing to remain high is the supply of land. While India does not have a scarcity of land like Japan does, the problem is that politicians control the supply of land. Every state and central and politician has land held in benami. And this is the real bubble that has kept home prices high.
As Ruchir Sharma writes in Breakout Nations “Lately Indian businessmen have been regaling one another with accounts of a leading politician from Mumbai who is known to have amassed a huge wealth through property deals. At a private screening of a new Bollywood movie, this politician asked the producer to replay a particular song-and-dance number, over and over. When the producer asked if he was taken with the leading lady, the politician said no, he was eyeing the location and wondering where the producer had found such an attractive stretch of open space in Mumbai.”
If home prices have to come down, it is this link that needs to be broken.
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on March 14, 2013
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He tweets @kaul_vivek)
The Caravan
What Manish Tewari is trying to do is confuse us – like Sibal
Vivek Kaul
The urdu poet Bashir Badr once wrote “dil ki duniya purani dilli hai, job hi guzra hai usne loota hai.” (Loosely translated which means that the heart’s world is like Old Delhi, whoever has passed through has looted it).
The politicians who run the current United Progressive Alliance (UPA) operate out of New Delhi, and like the chieftains of the yore who robbed Old Delhi, they continue to rob New Delhi and in the process India.
One such robber politician is A Raja who sold 122 telecom licenses at Rs 9,200 crore in 2008, a price which was significantly lower than the price the government could have got if it had auctioned the licenses. The Comptroller and Auditor General(CAG) made four estimates of the losses on account of this. These losses worked out to Rs 57,666 crore, Rs 67,364 crore, Rs 69,626 crore and Rs 1,76,645 crore.
As is wont in such cases the media ran with the highest figure and put the losses on account of shenanigans of Raja at Rs 1,76,000 crore. But even a loss of Rs 57,666 crore was no small number.
The Supreme Court canceled these licenses. The government recently tried to auction these licenses again. Its aim was to raise Rs 40,000 crore from these auctions. It managed to raise only Rs 9,407 crore.
This prompted Manish Tewari the newly appointed minister for Information and Broadcasting to ask “Mr CAG, where is the Rs 1.76 lakh crore?”
Tewari went on to add that “I think it is time for some serious introspection. It’s time the CAG introspects on his processes and it is high time that the BJP and some of the other opposition parties, which had made this their holy-grail and swansong of politics over the last two years, should publicly apologise.”
The comment is along the lines of Kapil Sibal’s famous zero loss theory on the CAG’s estimates of the losses to the government on account of Raja’s shenanigans. “The logic underlying this estimate is completely flawed. Government policy is formulated with a view to maximising public welfare, and not merely to maximise Government revenues. The pricing of different natural resources is often done in a manner that meets this objective,” Sibal had said justifying the decision of the government to sell telecom licenses in 2008 at the same price as they had sold in 2001. “No loss at all. Zero is the loss…It (the calculation made by CAG) has embarrassed the government, it has embarrassed the nation.”” Sibal declared.
But how does the government explain the fact that Unitech, a company which got the license in 2008, went around and sold 60% of its stake to Telenor for Rs 6,120 crore even before it had constructed a single tower to launch a mobile phone service. It had paid only Rs 1651 crore for the telecom licenses. Shouldn’t this money have realistically flown into government coffers?
So what can safely be said was that Sibal was essentially trying to complicate the issue in order to confuse the nation. As a recent profile on Sibal in the The Carvan magazine puts it “There was a method to Sibal’s madness. This was his opening statement before the court of public opinion, and he had unquestionably taken the strongest possible line in his client’s defence. That few seemed to believe him was beside the point. His audacity had muddied the waters just enough to introduce doubts in what had looked like an open-and-shut case, demonstrating that a sufficiently strenuous and elaborate defence of the indefensible could perhaps make it defensible after all.”
Manish Tewari is working along similar lines and trying to complicate the issue or as The Caravan puts it in Sibal’s case “muddle the water just enough”.
We need to understand a few things here to basically look through Tewari’s statement. CAG used various methods to arrive at the loss estimates that it did. For the estimate of Rs 1,76,645 crore, CAG used the prices that companies paid when the 3G licenses were auctioned in 2010. The logic being that if the telecom licenses had been auctioned in 2008 and companies had paid the same prices that they did for 3G licenses in 2010, the government could have made Rs 1,76,645 crore more than it actually did.
Similarly other ways were used to arrive at other loss estimates. Another loss estimate of Rs 69,626 crore was based on the price at which Unitech sold 60% of the stake in its telecom business to Telenor immediately after getting the telecom license in 2008.
So, yes, there was a loss to the government and the nation when A Raja sold off 122 telecom licenses for Rs 9,200 crore. There is no beating that irrespective of what Tewari now and Sibal earlier had to say.
Let’s come back to the recent telecom auction and the inability of the government to raise much money from it, something that prompted Tewari to ask “Mr CAG, where is the Rs 1.76 lakh crore?”
Just because the government couldn’t raise as much as it was expecting to from this auction does not mean that the way the government went around selling telecom licenses in 2008 was correct. Second, much has changed between 2008 and 2012. The finances of the Indian government are in a mess. Inflation and interest rates are high. And economic growth is stagnating. Hence, telecom companies are no longer in the mood to pay the high prices that they did for 3G spectrum in 2010. Also, if the government raised the kind of money that it did with the 3G auction in 2010, imagine the kind of money it could have raised had it decided to auction telecom licenses in 2008 when the financial crisis had not yet broken out, instead of giving them away on a first come first serve basis.
But Tewari is working along expected lines. He is a lawyer by qualification who was expected to muddle up things as a spokesperson for the Congress party. And he is working along similar lines after taking over as the minister for information and broadcasting, a post from which he can hope to effectively control opinion.
As Noam Chomsky, the world’s foremost living intellectual, points out in How the World Works “Ultimately, the governors, the rulers, can only rule if they control opinion…This is true of the most despotic societies and the most free… If the general population won’t accept things, the rulers are finished.”
In this day and age of the internet where it is very difficult to totally control opinion that is going around, the best a ruler can do is muddle the opinion and that is what Tewari is trying to do in this case.
Also having been in the party for too long Tewari has now tasted real power and is trying to do a Sibal. The Caravan in its recent profle of Sibal wrote “Among the country’s chattering classes, his innumerable television appearances and indefatigable zeal for defending the indefensible have made him a favourite target for mockery and derision—in which he typically appears as a caricature combining the worst qualities of lawyers, politicians and out-of-touch elites. But Sibal is well aware that his prominence within the party depends on these over-the-top performances, and it could be argued that no other politician has taken better advantage of the present age of around-the-clock television shoutfests and exaggerated sound-bites.”
This could have easily been written for Tewari as well.
The article originally appeared on www.firstpost.com on November 19, 2012.
(Vivek Kaul is a writer. He can be reached at [email protected])