India has successfully moved up to 35th place on the Global Real Estate Transparency Index (GRETI) and this has been made possible due to improving market dynamics, FDI liberalization and reforms in the real estate sector in addition to the affordable housing segment getting infrastructure status and digitization of property records. India is now one of the top 10 countries in the world to post such improvements in real estate transparency over the last couple of years or so. India has come up by 5 places from 2014 in this survey conducted by JLL globally.
The improvement in India should be a heartening development for the Government and realty players alike. South Africa and China have taken the 21st and 33rd positions on the list while Russia is at number 38. Brazil has come down to number 37 in the list. Experts feel that the huge improvement in transparency for the Indian real estate market will positively impact the entire nation with regard to higher global capital deployment in India, better market sentiments, reforms and policies and FDI liberalization across both retail and real estate. Additionally, another key influencer behind this achievement is the increasing accessibility of information in the public domain as per reports. Technology has also played a huge part in ushering in greater transparency in the real estate sector.
Experts also feel that India’s rankings should go up even more in the future by 2020 due to extensive implementation of RERA across all States and the introduction of several Land Title Insurance policies and weeding out of illegal properties under the Benami Transactions Act. The realty sector will also be fully aligned with GST by then as per experts. Equity investments in the real estate sector in India are always perceived as key indicators of overall investor sentiment and confidence in the market. PE investment in fact has increased in the Indian realty market from $4.7 billion in 2015 to $6.3 billion for 2017. Large scale investments are also expected in 2018 on the back of greater transparency.
India is one of the biggest semi-transparent real estate markets and should definitely do well like counterparts such as Serbia, Netherlands, UAE and Thailand which have improved even more. The real estate sector in India is improving on the back of positive sentiments, total accountability and transparency, much-needed policy reforms and other regulations and most importantly, growing confidence of domestic buyers and global investors alike. India should certainly enter the top 20/30 by 2020 as per expectations.
