Good morning, Omicron is taking over our bandwidths faster than we expected.
Return to office dates have become uncertain once again, meaning demand for office space will not be out of the fridge for another 3 to 6 months.
Hotels and retail spaces are bound to face the chill as well.
But in the larger picture, we guess it's alright. Why? Because going by the standard of our love and care for this planet, we can only be expected to treat our own lives and livelihoods, with recklessness.
😷↔1 metre↔😷
A Booster Shot For Affordable Housing
Every major city in the world is struggling to house its hardest working people because housing cost always seems to be a step ahead of the policies being deployed to control it.
Mumbai Is Trying Too
The Maharashtra government's move to waive property tax on homes with an area of up to 500 sq. ft. in Mumbai and Navi Mumbai is a step in that direction.
The property tax holiday is expected to improve demand, supply and financing of affordable housing in India’s most expensive property market, and the move has been received by both developers and homebuyers with enthusiasm.
The Affordable Housing Backstory
India has been pushing the supply of affordable housing through various Central/State schemes and incentives for the past few years.
In 2015, the central government unveiled the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana, with the aim to build 11.22 million affordable homes, and between 2015 to March 2021, 11.3 million homes were sanctioned and over 4.8 million were delivered.
On the private side of the built environment, over 50% of all new housing launches across the top 8 cities in the last 5 years have been below the INR 50 lakh band.
The Larger Picture Is Bright
Per Knight Frank, India's housing markets are at their best behaviour today, when it comes to affordability, as low housing prices, combined with all time low mortgage rates have made homes more affordable in 2021.
While Ahmedabad, Pune and Chennai have evolved into the most affordable Indian housing markets in 2021, Mumbai has emerged as the biggest gainer in housing affordability since 2010.
Goodbye BlackBerry
After a 10-year long war with irrelevance, the BlackBerry is no more. The company ended access to basic smartphone functionality for its classic devices yesterday.
It's Curtains: If you still have a working BlackBerry running on BlackBerry 10 software or 7.1 OS and earlier, it’s time to hang up the phone belt holster for good, or perhaps use it as a fancy paperweight.
End of an era: Once the crème de la crème of mobile phone tech, the BlackBerry had 80 million active users in 2012, including President Obama, Kim Kardashian, and every real estate executive worth their corporate mobile connection.
😢
Taiwan's Housing Price Coolant Dilemma
Whenever housing price, central banks and interest rates occur in one paragraph, the news can't be all that good.
Taiwan’s central bank should consider adjusting interest rates to rein in the housing market, Deputy Governor Chen Nan-kuang said, in contrast with earlier comments from Governor Yang Chin-long.
📎 Chen believes loose monetary policy is a big factor pushing up home prices and interest rates must be deployed as one of the policy tools to cool prices.
📎 On the flip side, Governor Yang wants to use selective credit controls instead of interest rates, to tame the red hot housing market.
Is ESG In Real Estate Upside Down
With almost 75% of investors integrating environmental, social and governance (ESG) factors into their strategies, sustainability is moving from the nice-to-have list to the must-have one.
ESG Is Suddenly, Big
Sample this. The real estate and construction industry is responsible for 30% of all carbon emissions and 40% of global energy use.
And with that discussion spanning an entire day at the United Nations climate change meet, decarbonization has become the sector's top priority.
Real Estate's Race To Net Zero
Today, when an occupier scouts for a space to rent, it’s likely to favour one with the highest ESG rating. While no one expects the real estate sector to dump bad practices overnight, change - fuelled by capital markets, investors, occupiers and regulators - is well underway.
But to enable that change on a global scale, ESG benchmarking is critical.
The Way The Cookie Crumbles
😳 A recent Bloomberg investigation revealed that MSCI, the world’s leading ESG rating company, doesn’t actually measure a company’s impact on the planet.
Instead, its upside-down ratings “gauge the opposite: the potential impact of the world on the company and its shareholders.”
“As long as regulations aimed at mitigating climate change pose no threat to the company’s bottom line, MSCI deems emissions irrelevant,” Bloomberg published, without any resistance from the number crunchers who dish out these ESG reports.
Ignorance Is Profitable
🎙 On the side lines of the U.N. conference, MSCI CEO Henry Fernandez told Bloomberg that retail investors are not aware of how the rating was designed, and that even “Many portfolio managers don’t totally grasp that. Remember, they get paid. They’re fiduciaries, you know. They’re not as concerned about the risk to the world.”
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More evidence is emerging that the Omicron coronavirus variant is affecting the upper respiratory tract, causing milder symptoms than previous variants and resulting in a "decoupling" in some places between soaring case numbers and low death rates, per Reuters.
We're feeling better already. See you tomorrow. 💚
☕ The Crew@Ginger Chai