Buying a property is still on the minds of people, thought the budget for the purchase has reduced.
By Varun Singh
With so many bad news floating around there’s some news to cheer up the real estate industry.
A survey by a leading property portal shows that a large majority of 67% are still planning to go ahead with their investment, although with a reduced budget.
Property portal Magicbricks carried out a survey-COVID-19 Property Buyer Sentiment Survey.
The survey reveals that one out of three home buyers want to drop or keep on hold their property purchase decision.
About 56 percent of the respondents had either shortlisted or were actively looking to buy property in less than six months.
However, the outbreak has led to most buyers stretching their timelines by a few more months.
Interestingly, it has been observed that the Gen Z (people born in the 90s) are the first ones who moved out of the property market, with 50 percent either holding or dropping their plans of buying a property.
On the other hand, people in the age group of 25 to 45 years seemed inclined towards buying properties with a reduced budget.
According to the survey on an average, 52 percent of buyers are looking to postpone their buying plans, these buyers being those who had either shortlisted a property or were actively looking or exploring.
Commenting on the report, Sudhir Pai, CEO, Magicbricks, said, “The real estate industry was already suffering from liquidity crisis & constructions delays and now the COVID-19 outbreak and the resultant national lockdown has just compounded the problems for the industry. This has temporarily affected the buying intent of more than 80 percent of home buyers across TIER I cities. This in turn has also delayed the home buying process by 6-9 months.”
Across cities, Pune and Bengaluru witnessed the least decline in buying sentiment due to the uncertainties around the outbreak of COVID-19 among TIER I cities.
National Capital Region (NCR) and Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR), already had sluggish market sentiments before the lockdown and comparatively lower consumer buying intent.
The survey indicated that both these markets are likely to be slightly less affected by the lockdown when compared to cities such as Ahmedabad and Kolkata.
The survey findings hint that in general, the end-users are more inclined to buy property in the near term post-COVID-19.
Thus, despite the overall expectations of price fall in at least few pockets across the country, it seems the end-users should be the first to return to the market.
Most importantly 69% end users are planning to defer their property purchase decisions up to a year.
According to the survey, the top five challenges to property buying post-COVID-19 are price uncertainty, timely handover of the project, visiting sites, getting loans from banks and registry & documentation of the property.
