Real Estate Wishlist from Union budget 2022 Chetan Patel, Director, Gurukrupa Group

New Delhi, January 25, 2022: Union Budget 2022-2023 is soon approaching, and the market is abuzz with speculations and anticipations; just like most other sectors, real estate too has a list of expectations from the forth coming annual financial statement. The union budget is scheduled to be presented on February 1, 2022 by finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman.

Real sector has been experiencing fluctuation from past two years due to the pandemic induced lockdown and its aftermath, even though market experts believe that key relaxations in tax and waivers on GST can escalate the sector’s growth trajectory.

In 2022’s wishlist developers and builders want eased out home interest rate tax from the ceiling of Rs 2 lakh to Rs 5 lakh. In a plea to the finance ministry— confederation of Real Estate Developers’ Associations of India (CREDAI), an apex body for the real estate industry of India, has suggested exemption in tax, starting with Rs 50,000 to the investments made by Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs).

The next major expectation is incentives for private investment in the affordable housing sector and a GST waiver for under-construction properties because facilitation of liquidity and short tenure tax holidays might accelerate the retrieval of the realty sector. Developers wish for an extended tax holiday beyond March 2022 so that robust demand and recovery can be built in the sector.

Extension of Credit Linked Subsidy Scheme (CLSS) is the next big anticipation. Realtors are keen on an extension of the CLSS scheme under the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana (PMAY) for Middle Income Groups (MIG) until December 31, 2022.

Simultaneously, the Co-working space owners request a discount in TDS deduction. They wish to be in a slab of 2% against the 10% slab they currently are in.

In addition to this, they expect real estate sector to be granted industry status so that it can gain cheaper credit facilities from financial institutions. And, a single window clearance mechanism because presently often the approval of a project takes long affecting the delivery timeline. A single window will help solve this issue further aiding the timely delivery of projects.

Real estate in India went bad from good during the first wave of Covid-19. The sale went down in 2019-2020, the sale in residential sector in 2020 decreased by 60% in comparison to 2019, approximately only 1.38 lakh units were sold. However, business bounced-back up again in 2021, it is believed to be the ‘Year of Recovery’ by the real estate industry experts because the demand soared between July and September. Now, the market is expected to grow in 2022, even more so if the favourable expectations are met in the upcoming Union Budget, laying a greater impact on the revival of the sector.

Corporate Comm India (CCI Newswire)