Mumbai: The housing finance regulator, National Housing Bank (NHB), is working on a complete revamp of its residential housing index or Rs.Residex’. It is also working on new indices such as rental index and building and construction material index, a top official said in Mumbai.
“We are working on a complete revamp of Residex and we are likely to come up with revamped Residex over next three years’ horizon,” NHB managing director and chief executive Sriram Kalyanaraman said on Monday. “The new Residex will be having both evaluated value and registered value of a particular house as well,” he said.
“NHB is also working on two more indices which include rental index and building and construction material index,” he said, adding that “we have roped in the realty research firm Liases Foras for providing us inputs.”
As of now, Residex is available for 26 cities. “We will be adding two more cities very shortly and take it to 45 cities over next couple of years,” he said. “We are also working on automation of refinance which may take less than a year now to complete,” he said.
NHB is also working with various state governments for rationalisation of stamp duty too. “We are working with various state governments in the direction of rationalisation of stamp duty. So, we are telling the states to bring it down from existing 10% to 3%....if you lower the stamp duty, the volume will increase like anything and which will help the state governments pare the losses incurred in the reduction of stamp duty,” he said.
Besides, NHB is currently studying if the existing system of property insurance is viable for the customers. Very few people know that property insurance covers only the construction cost of the property they own, said Kalyanaraman. To be completed in five months, the study is being done by Hyderabad-based Administrative Staff College of India (ASCI) on behalf of NHB. The idea is to know from customer’s perspective if the insurance product is useful, he said.
