Many a times, we struggle to find the place to store towels in the bathroom. I have seen people throw the towel over the shower head or squeeze it into the door handle. Some people have the rods like the one shown below.

Image Courtesy : jaquar.com

Image Courtesy : jaquar.com

An alternate solution is to have a towel rack which also has the rod below. The rack can be used to store clean and dry towels whereas the rod below can be used to hang the towels in use. I think this is a great idea. Any comments?

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This is just an image post. I liked this wardrobe a lot. It was very elegant in it’s design and also simplistic.

Click Image to continue

As you can see from the image above it has 5 storage units on the top where a family can dump their sparingly used stuff.

On the bottom there are two full sized wardrobes. One could be for “his” and the other for “her”.

There is a small mirror in the center which is accompanied by a drawer to store cosmetics and another storage unit below for holding items.

One thing which could have been provided by the manufacturer is a lamp above to uniformly illuminate the person’s face who is getting dressed. But this is optional.

Also a good thing about this room was the floor. It had this wooden floor feel attached to it. It consisted of sheets of laminate glued to the the floor and was very nice to walk on. Compared to conventional tiles it was not cold at all to walk on this surface.

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Reports from the construction industry indicate that the cost of constructing new buildings have increased dramatically in the last one year or so.

Cost of steel has doubled in the last one year to about Rs. 60,000 a tonne. Similarly, cement prices are continuously rising and so are sand prices. Of course, labour and transport are also much more expensive. All this adds upto what is described below.

Just an year back, overall construction costs were only about Rs. 1250 per sq ft. (itself quite high compared to previous years) then it increased to Rs. 1400 per sq. ft. about six months back. Now in the last few months, it has hovered between Rs. 1650 and Rs. 1800 per sq. ft. 

Large projects can take years to complete, during which such cost increases can eliminate margins of the builders. So Credai (Confedaration of Real Estate Developers Association of India) is likely to insist on inserting escalation clauses to cover such increases in future.

Translation - buyers will have to pay for these increases in future. Trust the builders to pass on these cost to the end users, who as usual have no real say in the matter.

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Yesterday morning I had a surprise phone call from an agency that was arranging to take people on a site visit to some place near the Mahindra World City SEZ in Chennai. They said they had gotten my number from justdial.

I certainly hadn’t given justdial permission to share my mobile number with 3rd parties, but I couldn’t resist listening to the pitch nevertheless, considering my posts on aavaas. Seems like the price there is already 650 per square feet. Mind you, this is at least 7 km from the large 1400 acre SEZ and 3.5 km into the interior from the main GST road.

On my enquiry as to why the price was so high (what else would a potential buyer say ), they gave the usual spiel about the plots being DTCP approved and that it is fenced etc. Thought it worth putting up here, since we were discussing about finding lands in areas that are about to be urbanised. Am sure any real estate agent would know of dozens of these layouts and there are several online portals also.

But Caveat emptor.. buyer beware..

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With some interesting comments from our readers in the last post, thought I’ll do one more post in this series. This being primarily to identify situations where apartments are better than independent houses purely on an investment basis.

Anyone who has read part 3 & part 4 would know in which direction my views lie. But if I have learned anything in life, it is that there is an exception to every rule and a negative to every positive and vice versa and inside out and forward backward. That’s why the world works and remains interesting to us. To cut short on the philosophy front and getting to the point - not all independent houses are necessarily superior. The ‘location’ matters a tremendous amount.

If you go and buy a villa/bungalow in a village/small town thinking it is a better investment, I am sorry!! You can wait till elephants roost on trees and relatively nothing would have changed on the price front for your villa. Real estate price increases is largely centred around urban centres and will continue to be so. Only exception I know of is Kerala where land prices have increased tremendously even in villages. The reason is unique to it - NRI Keralites are treating the entire state as a retirement home.

One of the good things when you buy an apartment is that you are naturally protected against the foolishness of buying something in a remote corner of the country. The apartment builders who are sinking in their money would have ensured that the location is relatively alright and ripe for future urbanisations. And the degree to which a locality gets urbanised is what will eventually determine the future value of homes in that area. When I say urbanised, I don’t mean noisy-polluted streets; rather that it is an area of job creation so that people will immigrate to it than emigrate from it.

 So, to sum up the investment theme on homes:

If you are an average joe who doesn’t want think too much but want a good investment that is sure to appreciate, shut your eyes and buy an apartment in any of the top Indian cities. You will not regret it.

If you think you are smarter than the average guy and feel that you have what it takes to make indpendent decisions involving relatively large sums of money, buy a villa near a locality that you judge to be ripe for urbanisation. Reward is more if urbanisation happens; but if your judgement is wrong, prices can stay flat for upwards of 10 years..

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