Kailash Babar | ET Bureau | April 05, 2021.
Residential property markets across top 8 cities in India have witnessed a steady rise in both sales and launches in the first quarter ending March led by lower interest rates, discounts offered by developers and government sops including stamp duty reduction in key markets.
While launches rose 38% on year to 76,006 units, sales grew 44% to t 71,963 units in these markets including Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR), Delhi-NCR, Bangalore, Pune, Chennai and Hyderabad, showed a Knight Frank India report.
“The first quarter of 2021 saw a significant rise in sales across the key markets, led by Mumbai and Pune – the two markets that received substantial backing from the state government in the form of reduced stamp duty. Other cities also recorded a rise in sales of homes due to a shift in attitude in homebuyers that has now started to prefer ownership,” said Shishir Baijal, Chairman & Managing Director, Knight Frank India. “That coupled with home loan interest rates at multi-decade lows of sub 7%, a substantial correction in apartment prices, as well as increase in household savings, seems to have convinced homebuyers that this was an opportune time to purchase their properties.”
Homebuyers were inclined to acquire ready or near-ready inventory to minimise completion risk. This is reflected in the average age of inventory which stayed at 16.7 quarters in Q1 2021 compared to 15.9 quarters in the year ago period. This is also in line with developers focusing on liquidating older inventory before launching new products which has consistently helped reduce unsold inventory levels to 0.44 million units in Q4 2020, 2% less than a year ago.
