News Roundup: Falling Property Launches To Mumbai Port Trust's Land Made Available For Affordable Housing

The Union Shipping Minister, Nitin Gadkari, on May 8, 2015, said the Center would release parts of Mumbai Port Trust's land for building affordable homes.

Here are the other real estate news stories of the day:

The number of property launches in nine major cities declined, according to a new report by PropTiger.com. The Goa government plans to regularize illegal homes. In the Asia-Pacific region, real estate was among the sectors in which the number of investments was among the largest in 2014. Godrej Group wants to invest more in real estate in India.

Let us now go into these stories in details:

1. The Union Shipping Minister, Nitin Gadkari, has promised to hand over Mumbai Port Trust's 350 acres of land to the Maharashtra government for building affordable homes. The Maharashtra government had put forward a proposal to release some parts of the land for rental accommodation and affordable homes. Since 600 acres of mill land was used for real estate development in the early '90s, this is the largest transfer of land in Mumbai. Because of topographical constraints and low FSI, property in Mumbai is expensive and space very congested.

2.  According to a report by PropTiger.com, the number of new property units launched in the quarter ended March 2015 declined 57% from a year ago to 43,328 across the large nine markets for property in India. The only exceptions were Gurgaon and Hyderabad, where the rate of increase was 174% and 129% respectively. Unsold inventory is the highest in Noida, at 106,795 units, and 139, 904 units in Mumbai. Contrary to the assumption that much of unsold inventory is found in premium residential projects, more than 52% of the unsold inventory was in the affordable homes segment, though nearly 25% the new property launches in these cities were priced over Rs. 1 crore.

3. The Goa government plans to regularize illegal homes. It is expected that in a year, all illegal homes would come under legal ambit. Nearly 30,000 illegal homes would be regularized under this drive. The state government would also amend the current Town and Country Planning Act to ease norms for real estate industry in Goa. 

4. According to Bain and Co.'s India Private Equity Report 2015, the number and value of PE and venture capital (VC) deals surged in the Asia-Pacific region. Real estate was one of the sectors where the number of investments were the greatest, apart from consumer technology (CT), banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) sectors.

5. The $4.1-billion Godrej Group plans to invest more in real estate, to express solidarity with the Prime Minister's 'Make in India' campaign. The Godrej Group owns Godrej Properties Limited, which was the first in India to have ISO certification. Adi Godrej, chairman of the Godrej group, said that their real estate business has become their fastest growing business in the past five years.