Festive Season In A Year Of Transformation

Festive season 2021 comes at a time when most pandemic-triggered restrictions within the country have been lifted. As such, the housing sector is all set to witness a spurt in demand, opines Anuj Puri, Chairman, ANAROCK Group

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The trend of the Indian festive season becoming the annual high point for housing sales originates from traditional sentiment. Simply put, it is considered a fortuitous time to invest in wealth-creating assets. While traditional sentiment is obviously still involved, it eventually ceased to be the most important driving factor behind housing traction. Sales in this period are now primarily driven by the fact that developers and lending banks roll out the most attractive offers of the entire year during the festive season. That said, festive season 2021 is unique in many ways.

There is also a lot of demand for homes – both old demand (pent up from before the pandemic) and new demand – coming from people who were content with renting homes before. One of the most defining features of today’s housing demand is that even millennials are now on the market for home ownership. This was a predominantly ‘renting generation’ which preferred to use its money for other investments and purposes, not for buying homes. There are reasons for this change.

Reviewing a Nightmare

Above everything else, the pandemic has had the effect of intimidating people, institutions and markets, inducing a feeling of having no control over what was happening.

Everything depended on what a virus did next, and how people reacted to it. Life became impossible to predict and the media was filled with news and horrible images of death, devastation and danger. For a long time, jobs were lost at worst or uncertain at best, salaries and markets nosedived, and most people’s investments lost value.