This Diwali is cracker of a time to buy property!

However, the demand bounced back and sales started to revive from July 2020 onwards. The 2020 festive season turned out to be decent for developers, especially for those with projects in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) and Pune, thanks to the stamp duty reduction by the Maharashtra government. Other major cities also performed well.

Sales momentum continued to pick up till March this year. Just when everyone started believing that the ‘worst is over’, the second wave of COVID-19 surfaced, bringing housing sales to a standstill yet again. The sector, known for its resilience, once again dug itself out of a ditch, with sales, as per the PropTiger report, growing by 59 percent year-on-year in the July-September 2021 period across eight major cities. On a sequential basis, sales jumped more than three times, driven by pent-up demand. Housing.com's Indian residential index for online search (IRIS) also showed that September 2021 was a record month in terms of organic home searches on the Housing.com platform.

Judging by the actual sales numbers in the July-September quarter and the surge in online searches on our platform, we are very hopeful of bumper housing sales this festive season - from October to December 2021. The Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) has already reported impressive number of registrations of residential properties during the Navratra period. With rapid progress in vaccinations and the waning of COVID-19 cases, we strongly believe that this sales momentum will continue through December 2021, when we ring in the New Year 2022.

Apart from positive factors such as low interest rates on home loans as low as 6.5 percent, improved affordability of housing properties and various incentives offered by the developers, we have witnessed some new trends that have emerged during this pandemic and are fuelling the growth in the housing sector. The concept of home ownership has gained momentum and even millennials, who believe in a shared economy, are buying apartments. People are upgrading to bigger-sized flats because of the need of extra space with the Work From Home becoming the new normal.

The COVID-19 pandemic has also proven to be beneficial for the real estate sector in two more ways. Firstly, it has accelerated the pace of consolidation in the sector, with housing demand gravitating towards those developers who have an impeccable track record of timely execution of projects. As a result, branded and trusted developers have reported growth in their sales bookings despite the adverse impact of the pandemic. Small landowners and developers are queuing up to tie up with such reputed builders, to do joint development of projects.

Secondly, the pandemic has also accelerated the pace of digitisation of this important sector, which is the second biggest employer after agriculture. The adoption of the latest technology and digital tools in several functions of real estate, be it construction, sales or marketing, has advanced by at least three years, thanks to the devastation caused by the pandemic. This has helped prospective homebuyers making their purchase decisions faster.

In view of these strong positive factors and revival in the Indian economy, we feel that the current festive season will not only help the sector to reach pre-COVID levels in terms of housing sales but also lay a strong foundation for robust and sustainable growth, going forward.