An increasing number of young professionals with fat salaries and high net worth individuals are now making a beeline for their piece of the booming real estate investment pie, buoyed by the ample supply of cheap home loans, its high safety ratings, attractive returns and more importantly, to savour the privilege of having bought their first major tangible asset, at an age when their parents were still climbing the many rungs of the corporate ladder.
Until about a decade ago, the average age of a person investing in real estate was in the range of 45 and above. Some examples to be quoted from India Real Estate are as below:
Vishnu Tiwari, a young NRI employed with a top British engineering firm in the Gulf recently invested close to a crore (in Indian rupees) in buying a duplex apartment on the 17th floor of a 24-storey luxury tower in an upscale Dubai neighbourhood. He readily admits that he could have got a much larger abode for a fraction of the cost back home in India but reasons, By the time he’s ready to return home in the next 6-7 years, this apartment would fetch me a king’s ransom since the rate of property appreciation here is much higher than that in India. All of 26 years of age, Pooja Shrivastav, a call-centre executive employed with a Mumbai-based BPO has already booked her two-bedroom apartment in an upcoming residential project at Kandivali, after securing a home loan. Ironically, it took her father, a retired PWD engineer, almost 20 years of hard work before he could think of purchasing a modest dwelling for his family. Pooja’s reasoning is quite simple: “If I have the money and purchasing power at this age, why should I wait for another ten years?”
For Kolkata-based Pronomita Bannerjee and her husband Abhijeet, a captain with a merchant vessel, their decision to buy a flat was purely from a long-term investment perspective. “We took a loan and though the price of the flat in an upscale South Kolkata locality was way above our budget we compromised on certain other aspects knowing fully well that when the time came to move to a bigger house this 1700 sq. ft flat would fetch us good returns.”
The above are the real proof of the potential real estate prevailing in this century. The thing to be noticed is the interest of youth to enter in to this field. Apart from investing in bank accounts, they are looking for the most lucrative source of investment, which is the investment in real estate.