Interview: India's home sales, prices to rise, defying rate hikes - Puravankara CEO

Puravankara

20/10/2022 09:26

By Nivedita Bhattacharjee
       BENGALURU, Oct 20 (Reuters) - Puravankara Ltd  PURA.NS ,
one of India's top property developers, expects both prices and
new home sales to rise in the near future, defying rising
interest rates, partly due to a recovering job market and strong
demand from older millennials, a top company executive said.
    The Reserve Bank of India has raised the benchmark repo rate
by 190 basis points since May to battle stubbornly high
inflation. Banks, in turn, have also hiked their rates, making
various loan schemes costlier for borrowers.
    "Buyers have already factored that rate hike in and there is
still some headroom there," CEO Abhishek Kapoor told Reuters in
an interview late on Wednesday.
    "The interest rate is at around 8% right now for home loans,
and I think the threshold is till 9%, after which we might see
some impact."
    Puravankara operates in nine Indian cities and competes with
other developers such as Brigade Enterprises Ltd  BRIG.NS  and
DLF Ltd  DLF.NS .
    The company recently posted sales of 7.93 billion rupees for
the quarter ended Sept. 30, with the average sale price jumping
12%.
    Kapoor said that bookings and purchases by older millennials
and first-time buyers were on the rise in recent months.
    "Last year, about 7% to 8% of our sales were coming from the
under-35 age group. This year we have seen the climb go up to
17%," he said.
    Puravankara plans to launch 15 million square feet of new
property by the end of this financial year.
 (Reporting by Nivedita Bhattacharjee in Bengaluru; additional
reporting by Biplob Kumar Das; Editing by Savio D'Souza)
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