IIM Bangalore’s Real Estate Research Initiative (RERI) is aimed to evolve into a world-class Centre of Excellence that conducts scientific and inter-disciplinary research on the Indian real estate sector. The research is published in leading academic and practitioner journals, and is expected to provide guidance and policy prescriptions to government and industry stakeholders on major issues relating to the sector.
Achievements in last 6 months
The last six months have been significant for RERI in terms of taking its mission forward, as mentioned below.
Research/Policy
- RERI at IIMB has recently won a large National Housing Bank (NHB) grant to study and recommend reforms in stamp duties and registration charges across the country. Apart from executing a large-scale national project for the first time, RERI has also gained access to government and banking data that would provide the centre great insights and opportunities for future research.
- RERI has won a research grant from Housing and Urban Development Corporation (HUDCO), directed by the Ministry of Housing, to study how black money is created, stored and transmitted in the real estate value chain. RERI got this award before demonetization but the project has got greater traction now with the Central Government.
- RERI is co-editing a special journal issue for Property Management, a leading journal in the real estate space.
- RERI has signed a MoU with the Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne, to work on research projects jointly. The centre is also in talks with other universities for similar research and data collaboration arrangements.
Data
RERI at IIMB has signed a data-sharing MoU with a large bank and with some leading property data vendors.
Industry Outreach
- RERI at IIMB recently conducted a workshop for Confederation of Real Estate Developers’ Associations of India (CREDAI) on strategic and tactical fallouts of the recently enacted Real Estate Regulatory Act. RERI will be creating a primer summarizing its main views.
- It successfully co-hosted the Urban Venture Challenge Contest in October 2016 to identify ideas in the urban management space for incubation. This event was held at the IIMB campus with pitches from about 10 teams (out of a total of 100+ entries) to several urban civic experts and representatives of the funding community. The event was jointly sponsored by IIMB-RERI, NSRCEL and Urban Venture Labs, and had participation from Stanford University Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, Asia Initiatives.
- RERI is currently in talks with a leading property developer on setting up a seed fund to identify and incubate start-ups in the real estate space.
- RERI recently created an easy-to-use portal for the public to determine whether their property is encroaching ‘rajakaluves’. This is part of RERI’s community outreach project to educate and inform the public on matters relating to land and real estate.
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Research:
We have won 3 research grants so far from LSE-based IGC (http://www.theigc.org/) to examine Indian land and housing markets (in particular, these projects study the efficacy of competing government policy tools to enhance truth telling in property markets, effectiveness of e-auctions in land markets and for the economic value of providing free titles to slum reside
- We have now data partnerships with
- Indian Housing Federation (IHF) which is promoted by Ashoka (https://www.ashoka.org/global)
- Janaadhar (http://www.janaadhar.com/)
- Magicbricks owned by Times group (http://www.magicbricks.com/)
- In addition, we are close to finalizing data partnerships with
- DBS Communities (http://www.dbscommunities.com/)
- Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, University of Melbourne
- We now have the following databases:
- Property registrations data in Bengaluru
- Property valuation data in Bengaluru
- Property listing data for 10 Indian cities
- Property pricing data (we are in the process of getting it)
- We now have three working papers, the latest one being on “Distortions in Land Markets and their Impact on Credit Generation in India”
Conference participations/invitations:
- NYU’s Inaugural India Research conference
- NUS’s Institute of South Asian Studies Conference on Politics and Economics of Land in South Asia
- WEF’s Partnering Against Corruption Initiative Workshop
- National Law School of India University’s conference on Law and Practice in Real Estate in India
Policy involvement:
- We are on the advisory committee for real estate issues at the World Economic Forum in Davos
- We were one of the select experts to provide views on the Real Estate Bill to the Parliament’s Select Committee
- We were one of the external experts consulted by the Bankruptcy Law Reforms Committee
- We are members of several Karnataka government committees (Sulabha Nondani, UPOR etc.)
- We are developing a portal for bank empaneled valuers to collect and provide valuation data in a streamlined and efficient manner (funded by HUDCO)
Media and community outreach:
- We have participated in several real estate discussions in TV media (such as ETNow and NDTV)
- We have written articles and have been cited in print media such as Mint, Economic Times, Business Standard, Hindu Business Line etc.
- We had started an effort to make real estate pricing transparent through a crowdsourcing portal (http://iboughtproperty.com/)
- We have a quarterly Housing Sentiment Index that captures buyer sentiment across 10 major Indian markets in collaboration with Magicbricks.
