The real estate sector was going through a tough period when the government decided to introduce GST and RERA. Jagmohan Garg, a Delhi-based realtor, says that both the reforms are going to have a huge impact on the real estate industry. According to him, the landscape of real estate industry will be transformed, and the industry will witness a revolution of sorts through these reforms.
While GST is already up and running, RERA is still finding its feet, and is likely to take off from next year. Both these reforms are expected to bring the much-needed transparency to the real estate markets, which will lead to a sustainable growth. Investment opportunities will grow as the bad players will be forced to either shut the door or mend their ways.
The owner of Mera Baba Group, Mr Jagmohan Garg states that home buyers were often scared of buying a property or pre-launched projects due to the presence of fake realtors. However, with the introduction of new reforms, any buyer can just visit the website of RERA and check out if the realtor is certified. The transparency brought by these reforms carried with it a change, with growing confidence in asset class. In 2017, the residential real estate class cornered the large share of the total real estate investment.
The GST and RERA is likely to affect the office asset class too. In the next two years, metropolitan cities like Delhi NCR, Mumbai, and Hyderabad are likely to absorb the highest number of office spaces, as the stock of total office spaces in sever major cities is expected to reach 600 million square feet by 2019.
According to realtor Jagmohan Garg, the retail asset class will have a similar type of impact. In 2017, retail space of around 6.4 million square feet was completed. The shopping mall stock is estimated to grow strongly in the next 3-4 years, and around 20 million square feet of supply is likely to come by 2019. Right now, majority of the stock is in big cities like Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, etc., but the portion of the other cities is likely to increase in the next few years.
In the GST era, warehousing is attracting investors and private equity players. The warehousing and industrial asset class has also seen the biggest-ever investment deal in the country’s logistics space in 2017. Mr Jagmohan Garg reckons that the government’s decision to introduce GST and RERA is already reaping rewards, and the trend is likely to continue in the future as well.