21/07/2015
Over the past few decades, the urge to ensure a better standard of living for themselves and their families back home has led countless Indians to migrate to countries offering attractive work-pay equations. This income-generating objective is the highest common factor — and though NRIs’ ties with their country of birth sometimes erode to a certain extent, willingness to turn a decent profit on investments back home does not. For a protracted period, investments in India did not offer good returns, causing NRIs to choose to invest in the countries they migrated to or anywhere else. However, with resurgence of Indian economy after the arrival of a stable government, intent on boosting business in the country, things are changing. Today, the Indian realty market is once again a prime focus area for NRI investors. The Indian realty sector as a whole — namely, across the residential, retail, hospitality and commercial verticals is slated to grow at 30 per cent over the next decade, attaining a market size of around $180 billion by 2020. However, investment opportunity lies less in Indian real estate sector’s speed of growth than in its overall dynamism. As such, it has been time and again vouchsafed that long-term investments into Indian realty pay-off very well as long as sound investment decisions have been taken.
Advantage NRI
NRIs today are keenly aware that Indian real estate once again presents them with a very hot investment proposition. That said, they do have their own leanings and predilections when it comes to where to invest. Generally, the NRI community prefers to invest in their states of origin — primarily Kerala, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra and Delhi-NCR. However, since residential inventory has piled up in Delhi and Mumbai, investors are currently very well placed to find good bargains in these markets, as most developers there are offering discounts and attractive financial schemes. The advantage that UAE-based NRIs (by far the largest contingent) have is that they earn in Gulf currencies that have traded strongly against the Rupee. This off-sets a part of the house cost already. However, the rupee is bound to strengthen further, and the advantageous difference between the currencies will reduce as economy grows under a stable Central government.
The Indian Express