Bollywood director and producer Aanand L Rai, known for his romantic-comedy films such as Tanu Weds Manu and Zero, has bought a duplex apartment in Mumbai where actor Sunny Leone also has a house.
Rai bought the apartments along with his wife Yogita Aanand Raisinghani for Rs 25.3 crore. The units are located on the 27th and 28th floor. The carpet area of the unit is 5,761 sq ft. The unit comes with five mechanised car parking slots, according to registration documents accessed by Zapkey.com.
The seller of the apartment is Crystal Pride Developers. The unit was registered on March 8, 2021 for which a stamp duty of Rs 75.9 lakh was paid. The carpet area of the 5BHK apartment is 3,967 sq. ft., it said.
Leone paid a stamp duty of Rs 48 lakh, the document said.
Response to an email query sent to Rai by Moneycontrol is awaited.
Local brokers told Moneycontrol that the price of the apartment is around Rs 40,000 per sq. ft, which is the market value. The project is by a Tier-2 builder, Crystal Group, and is spread across two acres. “It is an under-construction project and has only 34 apartments, which means the density is low. The unit may have been registered now to take advantage of the stamp-duty cut,” one of them said.
In January 2021, actor Janhvi Kapoor bought a property worth Rs 39 crore at Juhu in Mumbai, the latest name in a posse of celebrities and industrialists who have invested in real estate in India’s financial capital, taking advantage of a cut in stamp duty.
In November, actor Alia Bhatt bought a 2,460 sq. ft. apartment in Bandra’s Pali Hill Vastu building for Rs 32 crore.
On August 26, the Maharashtra government had decided to temporarily reduce stamp duty on housing units from 5 percent to 2 percent until December 31, 2020 to boost the stagnant real estate market, which had been hit doubly hard by COVID-19. The stamp duty from January 1, 2021 until March 31, 2021 was 3 percent.
The Maharashtra government had on March 31 decided not to extend the stamp duty waiver on property registrations and kept the Ready Reckoner Rates unchanged for financial year 2021-22.
In 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 a 3.7 times increase year-on-year, an analysis of the IGR data by Propstack, a real-estate data analytics firm, has said.