CHENNAI.....Good investment opportunities in all the segment of the city. Commercial rentals is on fast trek. Residential segment also having very good demand from rural areas. Outskirts of the city is now more costly then CBD residential areas.   AHMEDABAD..... ..... Huge NRI funds were recently invested in residential segment of the city. Commercial too is feeling the heat. Residential rates are marginally up by 20% since last quarter. The trend is likely to continue.   BANGALORE...... ...IT and ITES are again in the buying spree. Residential complexes are getting good demand. NRIs investments are up again. Service apartment concept is catching up in the city. Commercial lease rentals are rising.   PUNE.... ... Pune is poised as IT centre by the developers. In fact many leading IT brands are in the city. It has enhanced the residential rates. Outskirts like Viman Nagar, Pimpari and Chinchwad also now having great demand. Good time ahead.   DELHI .... ...The market is slow for residential units. Noida and Gurgaon also have touched historic level. New zones are in the competition. Faridabad and Merut along with Rohtak are busy catering for demand in Delhi and NCR    MUMBAI.. ..... ..Realty Fund and investors of large real estate holdings are still maintaining the price level. Developing zones are feeling heat. Small pocket developers are also panic in the market. Residential prices stagnated as of now.

How to choose your Home Loan lender
By Harshvardhan Roongta

So you have decided to buy your dream home but are confused about whom to take the Home Loan from. You have collected many brochures and may be receiving conflicting advice from friends, relatives and associates about the relative merits and demerits of various lenders. You have seen rates like 10.75% p.a. tossed around but are unable to understand why the monthly installments given by the HFCs claiming to give those kinds of rates are more or less equal to the monthly installments given by other HFCs/Banks charging much higher rates. In between you hear about the perils of pre payment charges, EMI changes during the loan tenure, etc. Unless you are a financial genius (and sometimes even than) choosing your Home loan lender is always be a tough decision. This article provides a few guidelines to help you with your decision.

First of all you must realize that the lender cannot be and is normally never preferred on interest rates alone. The other factors which are equally if not more important can be classified as under:

1) HFCs/Banks calculate your loan eligibility differently. Some lenders for example are very comfortable with self-employed persons and their loan eligibility calculations reflect that whilst some of them have special schemes for salaried classes drawing salaries above a certain value. In quite a few cases the amount of loan the lender is willing to give will override cost and other considerations.

2) The approval of your property is an important consideration for choosing your lender. If you are buying a new property than (other things remaining equal) it makes sense to choose a lender who has pre approved that property. In case of a resell property it might be good idea to show the draft documentation of the property to the potential lender before confirming your choice. Some lenders do not fund under construction property. Some banks are uncomfortable making part payments on self-constructed property. All these factors needed to be taken into account before choosing your lender.

3) Familiarity of the lender with home loan procedures can be another important consideration. I know that sounds strange - how can a lender, which advertises its home loan offering, not be conversant with home loan procedures? But this problem is especially glaring in the case of some nationalized banks for whom home loans is only one of the activities (although a very important one) that they undertake. Whilst the bank itself will have lots of experts who know this product inside out, this expertise is rarely available at the local branch level thus leading to avoidable delays, especially at the disbursement stage.

Having considered all these non-financial factors let us turn to the cost factors. Here again the method of interest calculation can drastically change comparisons. The biggest mistake you can make is comparing stated interest rates. The best way to compare two offers is by checking the installment amounts per lac of loan for the same loan tenure. Please ensure that at least one offer is from a lender which works on a monthly rest basis (or as they put it on a daily rest basis). The other factor to take into account is the upfront fees payable (by whatever name called). The fees could be called administration fee, sanction fee, legal fee, technical fee, file fee, MOF, etc. This adds to your total effective cost of the loan. Most people take this cost into account by dividing the percentage cost incurred over the tenure of the loan and adding it to the interest cost. For example if the customer is paying 1.8% fee he normally assumes it adds 0.12% (which is 1.8% divided by 15 years) to the stated interest cost. In actual fact it adds about 0.35% to the effective cost in this case. I have been able to calculate this addition to effective cost with the aid of my friendly computer. However a rule of the thumb could give you more or less the same results. The thumb rule is that addition to effective cost of the loan due to upfront fee is equal to:

(2 x Upfront cost as %age of loan amount/tenure of loan) plus 0.05%. In the above example this would be (2 x 1.80%/15)+0.05%= 0.29%. This thumb rule will hold more or less across various loan tenures.

Another important factor you need to keep in mind is the prepayment charges, charged by the lender. Most borrowers end up partially or fully prepaying the home loan and hence a prepayment charge adds to your total cost. Other things remaining equal you must choose the lender who does not charge a prepayment charge.