It’s not just home buyers who are affected by the land-acquisition fracas in Noida. Veenu Sandhu reports on how other businesses, which rode the construction boom, are caught in the chaos too.
No Ma’am, these projects are safe. We have a list of all the safe projects. Our official will call you and tell you about them,” the customer-care official at Investors Clinic, a real-estate brokerage firm, reassures for the umpteenth time. Until less than a month ago, such calls were unimaginable as lakhs rushed to cash in on the biggest residential real-estate play ever to have happened in the country. But Noida is a different story today.
The over 300,000 investors and more than 50 builders are not the only ones waiting anxiously for the Allahabad High Court verdict less than two weeks from now on the land acquired by the government in Noida Extension. There are many others whose businesses hinge on the court order. Armies of brokers and sub-brokers, thousands of architects, and dozens of banks, advertising agencies and underwriters find themselves caught in the sudden chaos.
A visit to Noida Extension, once bustling with prospective buyers and brokers who did business from colourful roadside tents — makeshift booking offices for apartments, plots and villas — shows that everything has come to a halt. “Nothing has moved for the last 15 days; there’s no work going on anymore,” says an elderly, sunburnt man sitting on a wooden bench under a tent which is now occupied by a green grocer and a juice maker. Another tent with a board loudly announcing “Construction in full swing” now provides temporary relief to cyclists and pedestrians from the heat and sand from the construction sites that stings the face every time a slight breeze blows. The brokers are nowhere to be seen.
“Many of the brokers have moved out of this area and are focusing on Gurgaon, Kundli, Sonepat, Ghaziabad and Indirapuram,” says Ahad Kamran, director of Jakasa Homes & Houses, a firm that underwrites large projects.
Until recently, every time a new housing project was launched in the area, about ten million SMSes would be sent out in a month. “Such SMSes have dropped drastically,” admits an official at Investors Clinic which has a dedicated marketing team to send out SMSes. The tone of the SMSes has also changed. “Noida Expressway — first region to get the settlement nod from farmers. Prices set to rise. Rush now,” reads one.
Banks, too, are taking no chances. “We have frozen all loans to the area,” says an HDFC agent. “For the last week, we have not been accepting any file concerning any project in Noida Extension and on the Noida-Greater Noida expressway,” he adds. All banks, he explains, are waiting for the High Court verdict before any decision on releasing loans is taken. “In Noida Extension, 70 per cent of the projects are on loan; only 30 per cent is self-financed. Builders, some of whom have already paid part of the commission to brokers, are truly stuck,” says Kamran.
More From This Section
On the Noida-Greater Noida expressway, the mood is marginally better. A handful of brokers can still be found sitting under trees. But instead of painting a rosy picture about dream houses, all they now offer are reassurances. Tejas Chauhan, a broker for 3C projects, says, “We are in talks with farmers internally. I’m also from this area, and we’ve been told that everything will be sorted out. Some projects might get delayed a bit but they will all be completed.”
Most builders, meanwhile, have suspended marketing projects. On an average, developers would set aside up to 5 per cent of the project cost for advertising and marketing. The overall budget would be over Rs 500 crore. “From five to six queries that would come in after an ad was released, we are down to just about two queries a day,” says Ajay Yadav, a broker for the 756-flat project of Vanalika Group launched in Sector 107 about two months ago. “This Saturday, not a single prospective buyer visited the site; this has never happened before.”
