For those who delayed buying a house because of conflicting reports of realty prices, here’s some g
ood news. An initiative from the National Housing Bank (NHB) will help you track property rates in major markets.
The country’s apex housing bank will launch the NHB RESIDEX—an index that would track residential property prices across cities in the country—sometime in March. Major cities that will form part of the RESIDEX are Mumbai, Kolkata, Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Bhopal, Ahmedabad, Kanpur, Jaipur and Patna.
The index will capture the relationship between the residential property prices and the various backward and forward linkages it has in the economy. Initially, the index would be updated every quarter.
Currently, most price indexes are arbitrary listings, with neither the consultancy firms nor brokers revealing their source of information. However, the biggest challenge facing NHB will be to keep it from remaining merely an academic exercise and minimise the gap between reported prices and the actual market price.
And to do this NHB aims to get regular information from civic bodies, government agencies, r e g i s t r a t i o n department, private developers, real estate agents and consultancy firms. The index may also help curb the huge amount of black money that exchanges hands in almost every housing deal. How welcome that will be for sellers is debatable, but the buyers will definitely rejoice.
