Good morning, Chinese real estate company Evergrande is the world's most indebted developer and its recent inability to service its debt has made the country's real estate sector shaky.
Another Chinese real estate giant - Kaisa Group Holdings, has just declared that it needs help to pay investors, workers and suppliers.
On the other hand, seeing the new record that Bitcoin and ether have just set, host of the Around the Coin podcast, Brian Roemmele tweeted, "They threw everything at the beast and still it moves."
🛺 - exactly.
Best In A Decade
Real estate recovery naysayers, there is no other way to break this to all of you.
In October, Mumbai recorded a 10-year best of 8,576 property registrations for the month. Also, in just the first week of November, 1,441 residential properties were registered in the greater Mumbai region.
The Rising Tide
In Mumbai, daily registrations, which were 219 in August, rose to 260 in September, and then climbed to a record 277, per the latest Knight Frank report.
This stellar performance by property transactions is being owed to the receding Covid thingy, all time low interest rates, and various government incentives being dished out to the home buyer.
At this rate, the total number of registrations in Mumbai should touch the 100K mark in November, with three more months to spare in 2021.
Can't Postpone This
The pandemic has increased the demand for housing across the country as people skew towards home ownership like never before.
Also, with health, safety, and the quality of work from home being top considerations, those who are financially capable are not postponing their housing plans anymore.
Self sustained housing societies - those with grocery, essential retail, and medical facilities - are hogging the limelight as home buyers now prefer to step out less.
The Higher View
Experts who have analysed the new launch booking numbers opine that this pace of consumption will continue, or get better through the last remainder of 2021.
Industry veterans feel that there is a sense of optimism after the pandemic, and that will continue to drive housing demand in the near future.
Data Is The New Architect
🛒 Checkout this.
WaitTime, an artificial intelligence (AI) crowd-counting start-up from the Cisco stable, is being used by venues such as Dodger Stadium and the Melbourne Cricket Ground in Australia.
Meanwhile, at the FTX Arena in Miami, Florida, digital messaging on entrances powered by WaitTime tells patrons where to find the munchies along with the length of the queues at the food counters.
Big Data, combined with AI is mapping shopper behaviour like never before, analysing human - shopping rack interaction down to the level of a few inches.
Data And AI Shaping The Future
Per The New York Times, the growing volume of data on consumer and crowd behavior is having significant implications on real estate design. It’s making even physical space more interactive for marketers.
This real time recording and analysis of consumer activity within retail stores — where shoppers look and hangout, with cameras capturing their actions and even their near-misses — is just the tip of the iceberg of using data and analysis to make commercial real estate more efficient.
Zooming In
With the pandemic locking down stores, physical retail may seem stuck in a soup but brick-and-mortar shopping is still very popular and a compelling investment opportunity.
Retail tech investment has hit a record $31.5 billion in Q2, 2021 already.
Amazon has spent generously on physical retail, including $13.4 billion on the acquisition of Whole Foods.
And with the development of its Just Walk Out tech, Amazon has rolled the human-less checkout ball among grocery stores and retailers - a trend that could significantly change the way retail real estate is designed.
Zooming Out
While privacy advocates are sweating about such use of technology, tech firms counter the resistance by saying that their systems are designed to limit what they collect and anonymize the rest.
For example, Standard AI’s software does not capture faces, making analysis with facial recognition technology impossible.
Half A Cup Extra
- China's Kaisa Group has recently pleaded for more time and patience as it tries to resolve its liquidity woes.
- The Tata Group is evaluating the sale of non-core real estate assets including land, residential and commercial real estate.
- In an otherwise slow moving Armenian economy, real estate deals are moving fast.
That Sinking Feeling
Tuvalu is looking at legal ways to keep its ownership of its maritime zones and recognition as a state even if the Pacific island nation is completely submerged due to climate change.
"We're actually imagining a worst-case scenario where we are forced to relocate or our lands are submerged," said foreign minister, Simon Kofe, to Reuters in an interview.
FYI, Tuvalu is an island with a population of around 11,000 people and its highest point is just 4.5m (15 ft) above sea level.
Since 1993, sea levels have risen about 0.5cm (0.2 inches) per year, according to a 2011 Australian government report.
Image: Social Media via Reuters.
Less Me More We
Commercial real estate is still being haunted by the memories of the second Covid wave.
Though demand for office space is on the uptick owing to workforces coming back to the good old office building, number crunchers have found a dent on the office table.
Slowdown In Office Leasing
Per this CBRE report, 25 million sq. ft. of office space was leased between January - September, 2021 - a drop of 4% over the same period in 2020.
Considering that 2020 was not exactly a year setting the leasing standard, offtake in inventory has been hit adversely two years in a row now.
The main reason for office demand nursing the brake pedal is the dark period of the second wave and the lockdown it ensured.
Supply Steady
On the flip side, supply of organised office space grew exactly 4% - YoY in the period January - September and stood at 34.3 million sq. ft.
With the way demand is recovering across real estate segments, FY22 should end with similar or better leasing volume than what was achieved in FY21.
Looking Ahead - More 'We', Less 'Me'
With an increasing number of employees headed back to the office, robust economic activity, and improving sentiment, demand for offices in the future looks healthy, feel experts.
However, co-working is in vogue and increasingly, corporate entities are looking for customised co-working options to enable work-near-home, the latest trend.
🎙 "India's real estate market has proven to be resilient over the last year. The overall outlook for Indian real estate continues to be positive", said Anshuman Magazine of CBRE.
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Have a great day ahead.
More blurbs from dry land tomorrow. 💚
☕ The Crew@Ginger Chai