Some of the best affordable homes in north Calcutta and its fringes feature at a real-estate show that opened on Friday.
Merlin Group presents The Telegraph Real Estate Fair 2019, in association with Ambuja Neotia, is being held at the atrium of City Centre II, New Town.
Real estate in India has not been doing well and Calcutta is not immune to the slump. But affordable housing segment has been the bedrock of Calcutta’s realty market for the past few years.
In the last half of 2018, 61 per cent of all new launches were below the Rs-50 lakh price point, revealed a study by Knight Frank, an international property consultancy.
Eleven real estate developers are participating at the fair, which will be on till Sunday. An organiser said the focus of this year’s fair was on budget housing in north Calcutta and its fringes, such as New Town, Barasat and Madhyamgram — where properties are cheaper compared with prime locations despite the places being close to the city’s nerve centre.
Among the first-day visitors were Pritam Roy and Sradhya Sha, employees of an information technology consulting company. The two are looking for a home to settle down after getting married next year.
Roy lives near the airport and Sha in Barasat. “We are looking for a home near the airport, Madhyamgram or Barasat. We had planned this visit before,” Roy said.
The two spent around an hour at the fair, checking out upcoming projects at multiple stalls and collecting brochures.
North Calcutta is one of the micro markets where many affordable housing projects have been launched recently. The second half of 2018 witnessed six per cent rise in sales in the north, the Knight Frank study says.
Visitors at the fair (Pictures by Gautam Bose)
Jessore Road, BT Road and Madhyamgram were some of the sought-after locations. The upcoming Noapara-Airport-Barasat Metro corridor, once operational, will further propel realty rates in these areas, developers said.
One of the projects being showcased is Merlin Urvan, coming up in Nagerbazar. “The project has four towers. It is spread across 3.1 acres, has plenty of greenery, over 70 per cent of open space and two large natural water bodies, apart from all the modern amenities. It is like a patch of forest in the city,” an official of the Merlin Group said.
The price of a two-bedroom flat at the complex starts from around Rs 52 lakh.
The Centre has provided a policy boost to the affordable housing segment with the aim to provide housing for all. The GST rate for affordable housing has been brought down to one per cent.
Moreover, the Narendra Modi government is providing interest subvention to the affordable housing segment, which allows a buyer to pay lesser EMI on a home loan.
Some of those at the expo were young people who regularly visit City Centre II, like businessman Trevor Chen who had come with Pinky Yumnam, a cabin crew member with an international airline. The two got engaged recently and were looking to shift to a new home in the Rajarhat-New Town area.
“We did not know about the fair. We were passing by when he saw a promotional standee and decided to drop in,” said Yumnam. They ended up spending 40 minutes at the fair and collected the brochure of an upcoming project in New Town’s Action Area II.
Uddipa, another upcoming project in Sinthee by the Ambuja Neotia Group, also generated a lot of buzz on the first day. The residential complex has three towers overlooking the Circus Maidan, not far from the Hooghly.
