Good morning, because participation in local politics, even at the poll booths, is extremely limited, elected officials are often swayed by just a handful of well heeled, long-standing people instead of, say, new renters in the community who aspire to be homeowners.
And all that biased feedback ends up preventing the most hardworking and needy people of our society, from owning homes.
Armchair activism has seldom caused far reaching impact.
But can technology bridge this great ‘community input’ divide? Perhaps a mobile app connecting every resident in a micro market could ease the neighbourhood's housing crisis.
We will always dream big, something the Australians need to do pronto, as you will find out as you read on…
🌞🧃🥤🍈
FY23 Could Be A Sweet Spot For Indian Realty Growth
Crystal ball gazers, aka international property consultants are finally speaking in unison, and all the predictions are leaning towards a good FY23 for India's real estate sector.
So Far So Good: Per Knight Frank's recent report, Q4, FY 22 saw India's eight major cities post a total sales of around 78,600 units, the highest in the last 4 years.
Also, quarterly sales jumped by 9%, YoY, with Delhi NCR registering the biggest growth - 123% YoY.
What's Going Right?
Per industry veterans, a host of demand boosting factors have come together in a blue-moon-ish like situation, for instance:
📎 A sustained growth in infrastructure,
📎 An increase in urbanization, and
📎 A recovering economy leading to large scale hiring.
Plus, the Omicron-Delta tag team event has shown folks the importance of owning a home. Also, people with smaller homes are now shifting to larger ones nestled in better communities, irrespective of their suburban pin codes.
What Can We Expect?
Office Real Estate: Presently, leasing of Grade-A offices is at 75% of pre pandemic levels, but this is expected to climb to 90-95% in FY 23, riding on demand by IT, ITeS, technology heavyweights, consumer internet companies, and others.
Easier Financing: Low mortgage interest rates continue to ensure lower-than-ever EMIs per lac for home loans availed, while developers are sweetening deals with discounts, freebies and better payment terms, all leading to improving home sales.
Fence Sitters Are Jumping: Many homebuyers who were waiting for the pandemic to subside are feeling the heat from their mothers in law now, and they have no lockdown card left to put down on the table. Such buyers are expected to make the move in FY23 as well.
3 Changes Blockchain Could Bring To Real Estate
Thanks to blockchain technology, multiple people can buy tokens of a particular property and co-own the asset, aka tokenizing a property, allowing fractional or partial ownership of the asset.
If the word REIT comes to your mind, you are completely on the right path, and here's some more food for thought.
Smart Contracts: Real estate transactions naturally induce lack of trust in buyers, which means deals mostly involve face-to-face engagements with various entities. But with auto-enforceable agreements (with pre-set conditions for enforcing/executing each stage), blockchain has opened up ways to change this.
No Thanks, Middlemen: Per Deloitte, new blockchain platforms can eventually assume functions such as listings, payments, and legal documentation. This means brokers, lawyers and financial transaction enablers could soon be seen sucking thumbs in the realty world.
Increased Transparency: Greed and opacity in the real estate market can have catastrophic consequences and Indians are not new to that. But when information is stored in a blockchain ledger, it is accessible to all peers on the network, making data transparent and un-fudgeable.
Time Travel Is Free
That is a late 19th century photograph of the arterial road/high street of Guwahati - G.S. Road (short for Guwahati-Shillong Road).
🧃 Nothing beats the Monday blues like a big rewind in black and white, over a cup of chai.
Australia's Public Housing Assets Face A Maintenance Crisis
The affordable housing news coming in from down under is not worth sending postcards about, but opinions are flying, suggesting 'thinking big' could be the way out of the mess.
What's With Aussie Housing?
Okay, so first up, it's common knowledge that very low-income earners can afford only very low rent, and in Australia, the gap between what they can pay and the cost of decent housing is not being bridged by the government.
This is making the maintenance of existing affordable and subsidised housing stock impossible, meaning the number of liveable low rent homes is sinking everyday.
And with fewer suitable homes available due to the maintenance crisis, priority occupancy is being given to those in the most dire need, who naturally can’t pay much in rent.
This catch 22 situation is further eroding the corpus available for upkeep and development of new inventory, shrinking the public housing sector further.
How Bad Is It?
🔖 Across Australia, so many decaying housing projects need to be destroyed that the AUD10 billion being spent to build 23,000 homes over the next three years will only end up adding about 15,500 units to the available pool of public housing.
🔖 In Tasmania (Australia's largest island State), the waiting list for affordable public housing has ballooned from 2,100 in June 2013 to 4,707 in February 2022 and the estimated wait time for “priority applicants” to be housed in Tasmania is almost five years today.
🔖 By the mid-2030s, it’s estimated 731,000 new public housing units will have to be built to house homeless and low-income Australians facing unaffordable private rents.
And BTW, Australia has two housing crises - this one and the bigger, affordable housing number. We will leave the latter for another time.
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At an average maximum nationwide temperature of 33.10 degrees Celsius, March heralded the early onset of summer in India.
Last month was, hold our iced teas, the hottest in 122 years since the India meteorological department (IMD) started maintaining records. FYI, the extreme heat in March last year was the third warmest on record.
Drink lots of fluids, make friends with fruits and don't challenge the sun like a Himalayan marigold. Tomorrow then. 💚
☕ The Crew@Ginger Chai