By Ramji Subramaniam
As the saying goes, home is where the heart is. Today’s home buyer is looking for features that would fulfill the aspirations seen in a first-time home buyer. There has been a significant shift in the choices of today’s consumer. The days when consumers looked for luxurious spaces spending half their income on just maintenance and home loans are now consigned to history.
A shift in demand for deluxe homes has been observed. New-age consumers tend to differ from the earlier generations to arrive at a rational decision of investing in any property. With the affordable housing initiative taken by the Government, India’s real estate is booming as it moves to provide homes for everyone in the coming years.
Changing needs of the new-age consumers
Over the years, the needs of the home buyers have seen dramatic changes. While earlier, buyers were interested in owning homes with luxury amenities in a posh locality, the new-age consumers are inclined to buying affordable properties with not very lavish amenities so as to cut down on the cost of maintenance.
Positive Homes is an emerging concept in affordable housing which represents all the positive aspects of a new-age home. People often have a misconception of terming affordable houses as being low-quality houses with little or no features. But, Positive Homes come with all positive aspects: positive location, positive pricing, ambience, specifications and design, and all these at affordable rates. New-age buyers are hesitant to spend huge sums of money on luxury properties, further hurting their pockets because of the monthly maintenance charges and the interest outgo on the home loans.
Positive Homes concept, with its smart pricing and innovative features, is sure to stand out. This segment of quality homes at affordable rates is targeted at the new-age consumers who are migrating to other cities for a job and other purposes, and consumers who have recently started off on their careers with a dream to own a house of their own.
Innovative operational model
The reason behind the availability of quality homes at competitive prices is the innovative operating model. With such an advanced operational model, builders are able to cut the entire cost, thereby producing positive and good quality homes at competitive prices. A 360-degree in-house operational model where everything, be it construction, designing, manufacturing and so on are done in-house and not outsourced to other manufacturing or designing companies. This approach helps in mass production and low costs.
Affordable pricing to be the point of attraction
Through innovations such as re-engineering of the development cycle, vertical integration, optimisation of overheads and most-importantly by keeping the margins low, smart pricing can be attained. In this way, all the benefits can be passed onto the buyers directly. Migrants shifting to other cities for jobs will certainly look for houses at reasonable rates and not prefer luxurious houses at a first go. What else could have been better for a newbie to the city like Bangalore to fulfil his dream of owning a house of his own?
Not only the young workforce shifting to other cities for jobs are deriving benefits from such positively-priced homes. With the constant increase in population, families also are in dire need of housing that are reasonably priced. As per research, it is said that even with a population growth of 1.2% per annum, there will be a need for an additional 10 million more houses per year.
Patrick Devine-Wright, a professor in human geography at the University of Exeter, explains the perception of homes as expectations of people in our society where one is supposed to grow up, purchase a house, get a mortgage and hurdle through the several financial hoops which he has been entitled to.
Today people, especially millennials, want to stay away from such financial engagements. In the modern world, factors of economy and choice are said to be consistently affecting the perception of homes. Thus, the concept of positive homes, affordability being the alluring factor, is expected to flourish in the coming years in the real estate segment.
(The writer is Managing Director of Sowparnika Projects & Infrastructure Pvt Ltd)
