Real estate in Mumbai is not high….
Here is a completely different perspective on real estate costs!! For a typical middle class person – say earning Rs. 6 lakhs at age 43..obviously houses look damn expensive in Mumbai.
However when you look at the salaries in the BFSI space – banks, mutual funds, life and gen insurance companies, brokerage….it is common to find 30 year old and well qualified guys/gals earning about Rs. 10 lakhs. Now if you stretch this, you also find a few earning as high as 30L.
If a 30 year old guy earning Rs. 28 lakhs is married to a girl aged 27 earning Rs. 22 lakhs, the take home income is about Rs. 50 lakhs. This really puts them in the RICH class – but their requirements could be higher!
When such a couple goes and sees a 3 bhk for buying, they do not bat an eyelid when they hear a figure of 2 crores. Let us say they make a down payment of Rs. 50L….then it is just an EMI of Rs. 1.5L per month.
I met a few such couples – in the BFSI space..- and all of them are either buying houses in the range of 2-2.5 crs….and all are in their late twenties or early thirties. The assumption that they make is that the job / similar job will continue for the next 20 years. This is not an unfair assumption – and the only KNOWN interruption is for having a baby/ babies.
The risk of course is that the salaries may not go up too much, but surely it will beat inflation. And even if the salary does not go up too much, they can be sure that they will get similar paying jobs. However there is a funny risk of both incomes stopping! Imagine when the wife is on maternity leave, the husband loses his job/ is downsized.
Well most of these kids have prosperous parents – so flying back to the original nest is a perfectly nice option possible. (I may do a separate post saying why parents should not allow this, but that is a different matter altogether!!!).
So for many of these 28 -35 year olds Mumbai prices do not look as intimidating as it looks to a person earning Rs, 5-8L and wondering whether it is advisable to work in India 🙁
In fact one of the kids said that his income has gone up so much that salary: housing prices have moved in HIS FAVOR…NOT against him! all d best !!
john
that’s OK sanjay .. I am not much worried about the social unrest .. its a pressure cooker building up .. and it has to vent out somewhere or the other ..
I was just trying to test the logic of our dear subra and get some response .. when he wrote that article .. that too not based on NRI or Black money .. but on some normal employed BFSI couple .. maybe i am just too alienated from the salary ground realities there .. at least you responded .. that’s good
Jai Ho
All those bloated salaries are coming out of OUR POCKETS!!!
Overrated is all I can say.
vishal
Subra,
Ur bearish prediction about RE in last many years has caused a loss to several genuine people who wanted to buy,and by listening to you they have deferred there purchase only to see prices rising 40-50% from 2010 prices.
Shame on you for posting your useless ,foolish posts without knowing anything about RE .
iT IS HIGH TIME YOU STOP YOUR BLOG.
Sanjay
Vishal,
RE is just a bubble. It will keep growing till there are enough fools. It will deflate once people realise that there is no bigger fool left in the market.