NHB's residential property index to turn monthly

Residex to source transaction data from all national banks, cover more cities

National Housing Bank’s residential property index, Residex — which made the realty sector sit up and take notice with its announcement last week that 22 of the 26 cities surveyed had experienced a drop in property prices during the April-June quarter — will soon undergo significant changes for a more robust system.

From a quarterly benchmark, Residex will turn a monthly indicator from the next financial year starting April 2014, NHB Chairman and Managing Director R V Verma told Business Standard. Reducing the time lag of the survey will make it a more efficient and robust system, Verma added. Also, Residex’s database will be expanded to cover national banks. Currently, it sources transaction data from 10 housing finance companies and 22 banks. NHB is planning to stretch the scope of data collection to all 30 banks.

Apart from that, the number of cities constituting the Residex is set to go up, too. In the next round for the July-September quarter, 30 cities will be considered. However, Verma said the cities are still being finalised. Over the next two-three years, all 66 cities under the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission scheme are expected to be covered.

In the April-June quarter, 75,000-80,000 residential real estate transactions were tracked across 26 cities to arrive at the final Residex result. Transaction details were sourced from banks and housing finance companies.

Of the 26 cities surveyed, 22, including Delhi, Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore and Chennai, saw a drop in property prices during the April-June quarter, compared with the first quarter of this calendar year.

This is the first time in recent years that the residential unit prices have fallen in so many big cities. This also shows that developers are resorting to cuts to spur demand in a slowing market.

According to the NHB Residex, a similar downward trend in prices were last seen in the July-September quarter of 2011, in 10 of the 15 cities surveyed including Hyderabad, Lucknow, Patna, Bhopal and Kolkata. However, even then, big cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai and Pune were not among those seeing price cuts.

Verma said there is room for some more price correction.

According to the NHB Residex, the biggest price fall in April-June 2013 was seen in Ludhiana, at 5.99 per cent. It was followed by Indore (5.64 per cent), Vijaywada (5.43 per cent), Hyderabad (4.55 per cent), Kolkata ( 4.06 per cent), Guwahati (3.92 per cent), Kochi (3.37 per cent), Patna (3.29 per cent), Coimbatore (3.26 per cent), Ahmedabad (3.13 per cent), Faridabad (2.42 per cent), Chennai (2.26 per cent), Jaipur (1.79 per cent), Chandigarh (1.55 per cent), Delhi (1.49 per cent), Bhopal (1.30 per cent), Meerut (1.05 per cent), Bhubaneswar (1.02 per cent), Bangalore (0.92 per cent), Pune (0.90 per cent), Raipur (0.65 per cent) and Mumbai (0.45 per cent).

Only four of the surveyed cities saw increase in property prices. These were Nagpur (3.07 per cent), Lucknow (2.19 per cent), Surat (1.43 per cent) and Dehradun (0.55 per cent).