Mumbai home sales drop 47%
Housing sales in Mumbai fell 47 per cent last month as the second Covid wave continued to wreak havoc on the city and the Maharashtra government discontinued a stamp duty waiver on property registrations.
Mumbai recorded property registrations for 5,360 units in May, a 47 per cent decline month-on-month. The fall was 15 per cent compared to 6,270 units in May 2019, the pre-covid period, according to a Knight Frank report.
However, the registrations in May this year were up 25 times compared to last year as the lockdown restrictions are less stringent this year. In value terms, Mumbai saw a decline in property sale transactions, from ~16,250 crore to ~7,246 crore, according to the latest IGR Maharashtra data.
While 29 per cent of registrations were from new residential sales concluded in May, 71 per cent of the registered properties were from sales concluded in the December 2020-April 2021 period. Of the new sales last month, 62 per cent properties were in below ~1 crore category.
“We are still far from pre-covid levels of May 2019 or the levels witnessed during the seven months of lower stamp duty window. While the overall sales volumes are marred due to the lockdown conditions in Mumbai, the heartening fact is that sales in April and May have been substantially higher in the sub- ~1 crore category, which is understood to be price- and value-sensitive,” said Shishir Baijal, chairman & managing director, Knight Frank India. “The government should reconsider providing demand stimulants at the appropriate time,” he added. According to the data from IGR Maharashtra, MMR collected stamp duty of ~417 crore in May compared to ~725 crore in April. It was ~250 crore for Mumbai last month against ~492 crore in April.
The state saw a 50 per cent dip in property sales after the Maharashtra government restored stamp duty to 5 per cent in Mumbai and 6 per cent in the rest of Maharashtra, from April 2021. “We have seen a positive impact of the stamp duty booster which stimulated housing demand in the last quarters. We urge the government to reconsider and trim it down until March 2022,” said Ashok Mohanani, president, Naredco Maharashtra.