Housing sales down 4% in April-June, prices stable

New Delhi: Housing sales fell marginally by 4 percent during April-June period at 53,352 units in the nine major cities of the country due to demand slowdown in the property market, according to a report by PropTiger.Com.

The sales, however, rose by 3 percent over the previous quarter, indicating that market is slowly recovering from the adverse impact of demonetisation.

PropTiger.Com, which is part of Elara Technologies that also owns Housing.Com and Makaan.Com, tracks nine cities -- Mumbai, Pune, Noida, Gurgaon, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Ahmedabad.

"Total units sold in Q1 of FY18 were 53,352 across 9 cities. Residential sales in the sector continued to gain momentum with increase of 3 percent over the previous quarter," the realty portal said.

"Despite the multiple policy changes such as demonetisation, RERA and GST, the sales in Q1 of FY18 was only lower by 4 percent compared to Q1 of FY17 sales of 55,500 units," it added.

In Gurgaon, sales fell slightly to 2,802 units in April- June period from 2,908 units in the year-ago period, while Noida saw sharper decline at 3,565 units from 5,202 units.

Property prices remained stable with a marginal increase of 1 percent. Except Hyderabad and Bengaluru, all other cities have witnessed price stagnation for the last three years.

As per the 'Realty Decoded' report, the new home launches fell by 28 percent to 29,606 units during April-June period against 41,313 units in the year-ago period.

However, the decline was steep at 43 percent compared to the previous quarter.

The property consultant attributed the fall in launches to the stricter norms under the new real estate law called 'RERA'.

The reduction in fresh supply led to reduction in unsold inventory by 5 percent.

"Policy changes in any sector lead to initial slowdown but long term growth. With RERA implementation in more cities, we might see further dip in launches in Q2 FY18. Sales also will slow down as developers will rush for registering their projects and arriving at new cost sheets and brochures," said Ankur Dhawan, Chief Investment Officer, PropTiger.Com.

However, he said this dip could be the beginning of road to recovery for the real estate sector.

"With the realignment of demand and supply in few months, we can expect the sector to see signs of revival on the back of more regulated space and festive offers by developers," Dhawan said.

News Corp-backed PropTiger.Com provides digital real estate marketing and transactions services. PropTiger.Com and Housing.Com merged in January 2017 to create India's largest full service online-to-offline real estate platform.