Through the pandemic, certain sectors have seen an uptick in hiring, while higher attrition and a talent crunch in the IT and healthcare sectors have led to better salaries and thus, higher purchasing power.
On the flipside, home prices over the last 4 years have remained stagnant across the nation, while demand for housing has not. The result? Housing sales are on a strong growth path, and industry veterans agree.
Increasing Demand From Metro Dwellers
HDFC MD Keki Mistry feels that from 2017 to 2020, the demand for housing was largely coming out of the tier-two, tier-three towns or from the outskirts of the metros, however, in the last year or so, even city dwellers from Mumbai, Delhi and Bangalore are buying homes.
Affordable Like Never Before
Mistry told CNBC TV18, "To my mind, in the last 20 years, housing has not been as affordable as it is today, for example, if you look from 2017 to 2020, house prices in the center of big cities have not gone up; it broadly remained the same or if anything may have marginally come down, but in that period of three years, income levels of people have been consistently rising."
The Beginning Of A Bull Run?
Abhinav Sinha, VP, Jefferies India feels, “So we think the demand that we have seen so far is clearly, the beginning of what could be a fairly long real estate cycle, particularly on the residential front."
With India's rapid urbanisation, a rising middle class population, low interest rates and consolidation among builders, there seems to be a lot of room for the sector to sustain a bull cycle.
