India looking forward to work on real estate investments
India is laying the groundwork in order to make the real estate investment trusts tax-exempt and allow them to trade on the public exchanges, a move that may help unlock as much as $20 billion of listings. Regulations on taxation will be also be amended, finance minister Arun Jaitley said on 10 July, and the stock-market regulator is preparing to allow REITs to be traded on the exchanges, according to Edelweiss Securities Ltd.
The introduction of the REITs will also provide a new source of cash income to Indian developers who have been struggling to reduce the debt with interest rates among the highest in Asia, while giving investors the ability to buy into the country’s property market. Some of the assets that may qualify to be included in REITs may reach $20 billion by 2020, as according to an estimate by the property broker Cushman & Wakefield.
In the first three to five years, as much as $12 billion could have been raised. REITs could be the game changer for the scenario in India’s property sector as stated by Priyaranjan Kumar who is the regional director of capital markets at Cushman & Wakefield in Singapore.
Source: Mint
