Festive Season Brings Smile In Realty Market. Housing Sales Up 104 In Leading 7 Cities

The real estate sector is perking up with home sales showing a 104 percent increase in the top seven cities of the country for the July-September period from the previous quarter, as Delhi and its suburbs top the shopping table, a report has said.

As many 50,983 houses were sold in the third quarter against 24,936 in teh second quarter of 2020, the report by PropEquity, a real estate data, research and analytics firm, has said.

“Indian real estate sector is showing some recovery, as many projects were launched in the last quarter and with various schemes and offers, developers were able to clear significant inventory,”  PropEquity managing director Samir Jasuja said.

“As we move into the festive season, we forecast this recovery to continue with more offers, discounts and attractive payments schemes to attract customers,” he added.

The coronavirus outbreak hit the real estate sector, which was already under stress, hard with inventory piling up as uncertain economic climate, job losses and salary cuts kept buyers away.

On a year-on-year basis, however, housing sales were down 35 percent to 50,983 units. At 78,472, new launches in the quarter, too, were down 30 percent year-on-year.

The new supply or launches of housing units increased by 126 percent during the July-September period to 38,131 units from 16,808 units in Q2 2020 as developers got back to work with easing of lockdown restrictions, the report said.

The Delhi-National Capital Region saw a 295 percent increase in the sale of homes against the previous quarter. Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) and Pune clocked a growth of 86 percent, 131 percent, 159 percent, 89 percent, 70 percent, 72 percent, respectively. This data includes lottery housing projects.

In MMR, new launches witnessed a growth of 113 percent to 8,056 units from 3,785 units and the absorption increased by 71 percent to 16,652 units from 9,750 units.

In industry parlance, absorption is the rate at which homes that are available in a market are sold over a specific time period. It is calculated by dividing the number of homes sold in the allotted time period by the total number of homes available in that market.

In Hyderabad, new launches went up 370 percent to 6,580 units from 1,402 units and the absorption increased by 158 percent to 4,677 units from 1,803 units.

Bengaluru, however, saw new launches dip by 2.42 percent to 6,049 units though absorption increased by 86.2 percent to 6,098 from 3,275 units.

Pune saw 8,664 houses being sold in the third quarter against  3,655 units in the previous quarter, a jump of 137 percent. Absorption increased by 73 percent to 9,539 units from 5,515 units.

While the numbers have improved from the previous quarter, but when compared to last year, fewer houses have been sold in all the seven cities. In Bengaluru, the drop in sales is whopping 44 percent to 6,098 units from 10,878.

Housing sales in MMR dipped 30 percent to 16,652 units, while demand fell 23 percent in the NCR to 9,375 units from 12,237 units.

(Source: Moneycontrol)