Anuj Puri, Chairman – ANAROCK Property Consultants
Traditionally, the Gudi Padwa festival season is an auspicious time to invest in real estate. Considered a time of renewal, it coincides with Punjab’s Baisakhi, Tamil Nadu’s Puthandu, Andhra Pradesh’s Yugadi and Kerala’s Vishu.
Since a large cross-section of Indians tends to link property acquisition with auspicious dates, activity levels on the property market tended to increase visibly in this period.
However, Gudi Padwa 2018 is not likely to bring the accustomed uptick, which – though almost non-existent even in the last 2 to 3 years – arrived in the backdrop of a more complex set of challenges than ever before. This year, this festive season will be juxtaposed with some interesting market dynamics.
The residential real estate market in many cities has been slowing down, and developers are hoping that Gudi Padwa will prove to be a turning point for many developers who have been struggling with slow sales as well as policy-induced compliance pressures and generally negative market sentiment.
Indian developers tend to look at the tradition-fuelled appetite for housing purchases during festivals like Gudi Padwa so as to mitigate slow sales during the rest of the year and offer lower prices under the guise of festival discounts.
Anuj Puri, Chairman – ANAROCK Property Consultants
2017 was quite an eventful year for the Indian economy at large, and the real estate sector got more than its usual share of the limelight.
A series of reforms and structural changes tore into the very heart of the industry, affecting a surgical strike at market opacity, unaccounted funds transactions and customer victimization.
The entire real estate fraternity had to re-orient their businesses to sustain in the changing environment.
Already, the real estate sector has shed a massive part of its unorganized and fragmented nature, and the ways and means of doing business in changed for good in 2017.
The incumbent Government maintained a laser focus on changing the fabric of the Indian economy, with direct implications on the real estate industry, by implementing highly impactful reforms:
Simultaneously,