A Housing Pricing Index (HPI) on residential property prices in eight cities across the country has been unveiled by real estate portal Housing.com in association with Indian School of Business (ISB).
It seeks to help homebuyers assess the appropriate time to purchase as well as assist sellers know the opportune moment to sell assets. Policymakers and financial analysts can make use of the Index as a reliable estimate to keep track of the trends in the real estate sector, said a release from Housing.com on launch of the HPI on Monday by Union Housing and Urban Affairs Secretary Durga Shanker Mishra.
Addressing the virtual launch programme, Mr. Mishra said the HPI has the potential to emerge as a good indicator of the country’s real-estate market health.
With the real estate sector impacted due to COVID-led slowdown and overall uncertainty, it is essential to track the growth via credible sources that will help authorities make quicker and informed decisions. “We have observed that the demand has already picked up in Q1 2021 and the sector has started to show signs of recovery,” he said.
Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi NCR (Faridabad, Ghaziabad, Gurugram, Greater Noida and Noida), Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai and Pune are cities whose residential property prices will be tracked as part of the initiative involving the portal, ISB’s Srini Raju Centre for IT and the Networked Economy (SRITNE) as well as industry body NAREDCO. The HPI will provide monthly reports on price and quantity movement in the residential property markets in the eight cities.
Group CEO of Housing.com Dhruv Agarwala said: “buyers as well as policymakers are mostly forced to rely on market anecdotes and guesswork about property price movements in Indian cities in the absence of quality high-frequency data, especially locality specific data. The entire idea behind the launch of the HPI is to address this issue.”
