Good morning, it boggles the mind to fathom that there are over 45 million cases pending across courts in India, and matters of land and property constitute almost two-thirds of all civil cases.
No surprises then, that India’s global rank in contract enforcement is a rock-bottom 163.
🍮 Freshly made fudge is the most common dish the real estate sector has served to the ordinary man. But is there a way out? Blockchain could offer solutions, you will see as you read on…
BTW, this morning, you are reading the 100th (Beta emails not included) edition of your favourite newsletter - Ginger Chai.
Quick Stats: 24,000+ monthly pageviews | 66,000+ newsletters sent each month | 30% - 62% daily email open rates… aaand we're just warming up.
Love you all.
🚴♀️🍎🥝
Indian Real Estate Is Greener Than You Thought
If you were thinking Indian realty was lagging major-time in terms of environmental responsibility, this blurb might course correct your sceptic train of thought.
How: Per a latest ESG report by CBRE, almost a third of the total office space across top-6 Indian cities today comprises of certified green buildings.
Are You Serious?
Pretty much. The property consultant analysed office space inventory in the top six cities (Delhi-NCR, Mumbai, Pune, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Chennai) to figure out the status of green-certified buildings.
It found that:
🍀 Certified green office space increased by 177% to 212 million sq. ft. in Q3, 2021 from less than 80 million sq. ft. back in 2011.
🍀 Sustainable office real estate has grown rapidly, and its share in the total office inventory has risen from 24% to 31% through the last 10 years.
🍀 In the 2017-21 period, there has been a 37% increase in the supply of certified green office buildings, when compared to the previous five year period of 2012-2016.
🍀 Delhi-NCR and Bengaluru together make up almost 54% of the total certified green office inventory in India.
What's Fuelling Tree Hugging CRE?
First, as ESG comes into major play, green certification has become an important metric for tenant decision making. The more sustainable a development, the more occupiers it attracts.
Second, the 3 Indian Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) - Embassy Office Parks, Mindspace and Brookfield India Real Estate Trust - are putting a lot of stress on the sustainability aspect of their CRE portfolio.
In One Sip: For commercial real estate (CRE), sustainable design, energy-efficient operations, and employee wellness are now the key factors being weighed by both occupiers and investors before committing to a project.
Three Tuesday Things
📌 In Kerala, around 650 of the total 1,147 cases against lapses in real estate projects have been resolved, according to official estimates and to keep the momentum up, the Kerala Real Estate Regulatory Authority has notified a penalty of around INR1 crore if real estate promoters fail to register their projects with K-RERA.
📌 To cool down housing prices and force real estate developers to deleverage and reduce commercial banks’ exposure to the sector, the Chinese government introduced three major policy measures, which began to take effect in 2021, making many Evergrandes appear from the woodwork. What's next?
📌 A real estate watcher feels that there are only two ways in which trust among homebuyers can be restored. One, real estate developers clean up their mess and adopt best practices on their own. Two, fast track courts are setup for speedy resolution of real estate disputes. Here's the whole case.
Taking Blockchain To The Real Estate Fudge
While the two versions of the internet revolutionised other industries, real estate has been slower to reap the vast benefits brought about by technological shifts.
Similarly, when it comes to blockchain, the concept of payments and remittances introduced real estate to the world of blockchain, when a home in Texas was bought with Bitcoin back in 2017, but there's much more to blockchain than cryptocurrency property transactions.
Real Estate's Blockchain Reality
To be honest, not all blockchain-related stuff can directly impact the real estate industry. It's hard to fathom how NFTs, on their own, can be valuable when it comes to tangible property, but other concepts like smart contracts, the metaverse, etc., could be game changers for the sector.
Digging a little deeper, we found 4 ways in which blockchain can push the 'real estate is good' cause:
1️⃣ Smart Contracts: These are programs developed and maintained on the blockchain to solve complex processes with ease. With pre set rules and conditions for every event, the power of smart contracts lies in their self-executing abilities, reducing dependencies on project administrators and other manual touchpoints in the real estate workflow.
2️⃣ Tokenisation And Fractional Ownership: Through blockchain, investors can access a peer-to-peer platform or even a REIT to buy and sell fractions of tokenised properties when they see a good deal. Tokenisation, therefore, gives an opportunity to securely make deals with portions of a single real estate asset.
3️⃣ Increased Transparency: In real estate, all information conveyed with blockchain technology is accessible to all peers in the network, making data transparent and un-fudgeable. Since information can be verified by peers in real time, buyers and sellers can be more confident in conducting transactions.
4️⃣ Improved Liquidity: Real estate is often called an illiquid investment, but blockchain can unlock real estate liquidity by standardising property titles and records, as well as increasing the speed of transactions which helps prevent loss of value.
---------------
You know what? There's just no way you could be having a bad day. How are we so sure?
Well, Afghanistan's last finance minister, Khalid Payenda, who till last summer was signing off USD6 billion budgets, now drives an Uber in Washington D.C.
Here's his story of ‘what went wrong’ from The Washington Post.
Make the most of everyday, today included. 💚
☕ The Crew@Ginger Chai