In a city like Mumbai, people want to live in the city’s centre and enjoy the vibrant culture.
In the last seven months, since stamp duty rates were slashed in Maharashtra, properties worth Rs 1.2 lakh crore were registered in Mumbai and the total stamp duty collection stood at Rs 2,914 crore, data from the office of the Inspector General of Registration (IGR), Maharashtra, has revealed.
Given that March 31, 2021, was the last day of the stamp duty waiver, as many as 17,728 units were registered, which is up by 3.7 times year-on-year (YoY), an analysis of the IGR data by Propstack, a real-estate data analytics firm, has said.
From January 1 to March 31, 2021, stamp-duty charges were reduced to 3 percent. In August 2020, the Maharashtra government announced that it was cutting stamp duties on housing units from 5 percent to 2 percent until December 31, 2020.
As many as 67,196 units were registered in FY 2020, and 88,068 in FY2021.
Following the stamp duty waiver, as many as 2,662 units were registered in August 2020. This rose to 5,597 the next month.
During the festive season, in October and November 2020, the figures stood at 7,929 and 9,301, respectively. It touched 19,584 units in December.
In January 2021, as many as 10,412 units were registered at a stamp duty rebate of 2 percent and 10,172 in February 2021, and, finally, 17,728 units were registered in March 2021.
As for stamp duty collection in Mumbai, Rs 875 crore were collected in March 2021 alone. In December 2020, the total collections stood at Rs 681 crore.
Overall stamp duty collection in FY 2021 was lower at Rs 3,474 crore, compared to Rs 5,357 crore in FY2020, the analysis said.
In FY 2021, the sales value at Rs 1.31 lakh crore was 47 percent higher than the FY 2020 value of Rs 89,277 crore.
Properties worth Rs 1.2 lakh crore were registered in Mumbai since the rate cut announced in August 2020, the Propstack analysis indicated.
In August 2020, properties worth Rs 3,528 crore were sold. In September 2020, the figure was Rs 9,025 crore, and in October, it was Rs 11,640 crore. Units worth Rs 14,395 crore were sold during the peak of the festive season in November 2020.
December 2020 saw sales of properties worth Rs 34,025 crore.
January 2021 had properties worth Rs 10,170 crore getting sold and February witnessed sales of units worth Rs 11,745 crore. March 2021 saw properties worth Rs 29,166 crore getting sold, the Propstack analysis revealed.
Another insight was that while the average property value was Rs 1.34 crore in August, it was Rs 1.61 crore in September. This number increased to Rs 1.74 crore in December and finally settled at Rs 1.65 crore in March 2021.
This indicates that the share of premium properties has gone up, given that the average ticket size of properties sold in FY2021 was Rs 1.49 crore, which is 12 percent higher than Rs 1.33 crore in FY 2020, the analysis said.
“Mumbai received the highest stamp duty collection in March 2021. The likely impact of the benefit not getting extended would be that sales decline in the next few months as most buyers had already preponed their buying decision to take advantage of the lower stamp duty,” explains Sandeep Reddy, co-founder, Propstack.
On March 31, 2021, the Maharashtra government decided not to extend the stamp duty waiver on property registrations and kept the Ready Reckoner Rates unchanged for the financial year 2021-22. Regular rates of 5 percent will be applicable from April 1 onwards.
Real-estate experts said that the number of units registered in Mumbai in December 2020 (19,584) and March 2021 (17,728), post the stamp duty waiver, are “unprecedented”.
“The highest number of registrations were last seen in 2018 at 8,327. Post that, the average number of housing units registered hovered around 5,000 to 6,000 until February 2020. In that respect, the December 2020 and March 2021 numbers are unprecedented,” explained Samantak Das, Chief Economist and Head, Research & REIS, JLL.
It should also be noted that the December registrations included pent-up registrations. There were many people who had to wait to get their properties registered during the lockdown and they did so only after registration offices reopened. The numbers shot up on the back of stamp duty cut, lower interest rates and sops by real-estate developers, he said.
Going forward, the property registration numbers are expected to go back to the pre-COVID levels (5,000-6000 units a month), he added.