Buying property in Bangalore? Think Again!

Buying a property in Bangalore looks like the top priority of every IT guy in this city. For many, it is like the you-can-be-a-millionaire-in-a-day-in-stocks syndrome (plus tax benefits, of course!). For some others, it is part of the hype that this is the ultimate city to be in and if you dont buy property here right now you can’t afford it any more. Either be the case, the whole frenzy has created a state in the city where fraudsters thrive.

When I moved in to Bangalore around a year back, the urgency to buy a plot caught me in no time! All of your colleagues and the whole city are talking about it. Always there is talk about a third person who made huge profits investing in land. Always there is talk about a missed opportunity to be a millionaire. By then, most places where I would have wished to stay was beyond me in price. So I went on looking for places in farther areas of the city, then for apartments and finally for building your own apartment as a group – in that order, dismissing the earlier in each case seeing it is not feasible financially (or rather, the finance/convenience trade-off was becoming too much skewed towards an inconvenient solution). In the meanwhile, I did have my share of fraudsters looting money (Mr. Manoj of MN Real Estate at Kundalahalli is yet to return Rs.10,000 taken as token advance for a plot in Laughing Waters, Mr. Aswath of Kasero Landscapes Pvt. Ltd. at Koramangala is yet to return Rs. 1,00,000 taken as booking amount for a green-belt land they tried to sell as residential property).

What we have in Bangalore is a scenario highly in favor of the supplier, more so due to market manipulation than due to a real gap in Supply-Demand. You have apartment complexes with 3000 units selling out in a week with bulk-buyers taking most of it. Then it comes to the real market at regulated quantities, adding 10-20% margin every month. And all this for something set to be delivered after 3 years!

Now it is sort of a challenge to materialise the apartment plan – am not for leaving anything half way. We have a group of around 40 friends who are for it, partly because they trust me to do a good job and mostly because the price we end up with is somewhere near half of what big names sell. What we are negotiating upon is to have a top constructor who do work for groups like SJR or Prestige do our work, employing the same architects. With some trusted supervisors in our hands, we are expecting to land a property with same quality at a significantly lower cost.

Probably more Aswaths and Manojs are on the way to cheat, or probably we would have a rally up the curve. Either way, am trying my best – and you know why I link to Seth Godin articles.