Chennai in top 3 affordable housing markets of 2020

Chennai

The latest affordability index of Knight Frank India on Wednesday cited Ahmedabad as the most affordable housing market in the country with a ratio of 24 per cent followed by Pune and Chennai at 26 per cent each this year.

Knight Frank’s proprietary affordability index, which tracks the equated monthly instalment (EMI) to income ratio for an average household, shows meaningful improvement in affordability over the last decade.

Even in the pandemic year of 2020, housing affordability further improved. The decline in house prices and multi-decade low home loan interest rates helped improve housing affordability in 2020.

While Mumbai is the most expensive market with affordability ratio of 61 per cent, other cities like Ahmedabad, Chennai and Pune are relatively more affordable. Even for Mumbai, the affordability ratio has improved from a high of 93 per cent in 2010 to 61 per cent in 2020.

The index captures movement in key constituents like property prices, home loan interest rate and household income that determine the buyer’s ability to purchase a house. City-wide average affordability statistics cannot highlight disparities in housing costs within sub-markets or across the income spectrum.

A ratio of over 50 per cent makes it difficult to secure home loans from banks and housing finance companies making it unaffordable to purchase a house.

Shishir Baijal, CMD, Knight Frank India, said the affordability ratio across top eight cities has improved tremendously over this decade due to an increase in income level, lower interest rate and subsequently lower property prices.

“Government interventions around improved credit flow, lower interest rate and cut in stamp duty rate in some markets have brought confidence among home-buyers in 2020,” he said.

“We believe a combination of best in decade affordability level and pick-up in the economy will serve as key catalysts for the country’s housing market next year.”

This year, office leasing in top six cities plunges to 27.4 million sq ft

Meanwhile, office space absorption across six major cities in India fell over 50 per cent to 27.4 mn sq ft in 2020, as per a Savills India report.

In 2019, office space spread over 55.7 million square feet was leased.

Of the total office leases in 2020, around 57 pc comprised large deals of more than 1,00,000 square feet each.

The report said Bengaluru led the leasing activity among the major cities despite a drop of 56 pc compared with last year, posting maximum office absorption of 6.8 mn square feet space.