Slowdown deters Puneities from buying home, car

Due to the ongoing economic gloom, Puneities are hesistant to buy property or even a used car, thus affecting the real estate and motor industry. Kaumudi Gurjar and Subroto Roy report

Slowdown deters Puneities from buying home, car

Due to the ongoing economic gloom, Puneities are hesistant to buy property or even a used car, thus affecting the real estate and motor industry. Kaumudi Gurjar and Subroto Roy report

Owing to the economic meltdown, Puneites are now thinking twice before investing in real estate. This is evident from the fact that property registration office at Warje, is witnessing registrations of a mere one or two flats a day as compared to 25-30 flats registrations in the past.

A source in the property registration office, Haveli No 13, said, "These days, people come here just for leave and license, mortgage and final deeds."

Advocate Anita Parasnis, who works as a consultant for property registration, said, "Several IT professionals who have already paid the token amount to book their second home outside the city are now rushing back to cancel the bookings."

No refund now

Parsins, however, added that due to slump in the market, builders and developers are asking people to wait for few months for the refund of their booking amount. "Builders are returning just one third of the total amount paid while booking and accepting that considering the layoffs and pay cuts," she informed.

The current slowdown seems to have affected the elite class as well as the sale of high end flats too have dropped considerably. Sudhanshu Purohit, CEO of ABIL Group, said, "Earlier we used to sell four to five apartments a month but now, on an average, the demand has dropped down to 1.5 apartment."

Whereas, R Vasudevan, of Vascon Construction, said, "It is not people don't have money. They are just not putting their hands in the pocket and writing checks. We used to sell one complete building in a months time which has now been reduced to just one flat."

Right time

However, Lalit Kumar Jain, MD of Kumar Builders, said, "This is the right time invest in real estate as the property rate have reached the bottom line." Also, he added that the interest rates on housing loan to have come down from 12.5 per cent to 11 per cent.
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"They are expected to go down further due to lack of liquidity in the market. And it that happens, then there would be no desperate selling in the next two months," he informed.

It's be-car these days!

The ongoing economic slowdown has put a brake on the sales of cars in the city. It's not only the new cars that have registered a drop in sales but also the used cars don't seem to have any takers now.

And this is mainly due to the aftereffects of the global economic gloom on the IT sector. The IT professionals now avoiding to buy cars, no matter whether it's new of used, due to uncertainty of jobs and the difficulties in procuring loans.

Vikas Khandelwal of Raj Motors, said, "Maintaining a car has become a quite difficult these days. Hence, sale of sedans and luxury cars have gone down considerably." He, however, added that people now prefer to buy smaller cars like Wagon R and Santro.

Khandelwal further said that earlier youngsters employed with IT firms used to buy and change cars quite often. "They used to sell their cars when they used to move from one city another. But now, that has suddenly stopped. Even those working in BPO industry too aren't buying cars for quite some time now," Khandelwal said.

He added that even the banks aren't willing to give loans to IT professionals to buy used cars, as most of them are have come from outside to work here. Even if someone is working in a top IT company but does not have residence proof, banks are hesitant to provide loans to them," he claimed.

A sale manager at First Choice, a company that deals in used cars, said, "Youngsters have stopped buying used cars now. Earlier, we sold around 50 cars in just two days at a car expo that was held in January 2007. But during a similar exhibition which was held in Hinjewadi, Hadapsar, and Yerwada recently, we managed to see just three cars," he said.

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