I am reading and enjoying Simon Johnson and James Kwak's 13 Bankers. Like a lot of recent stuff (including an OECD report), it takes a swipe, if a mild one, at the virtues of homeownership. If people think homeownershipp is overrated, I can live with that (even if I disagree with it. Where I [...]
...the cities with the most potential for real estate investment in India are Pune and Ahmedabad.
I met with a large developer here in India. He told me that "rent models," (i.e., discounted cash flow models) don;t work in India--that everyone wants to own property in India, and so India is different. I remember a Japanese real estate guy telling me the same thing about Japan in the late 1980s. At [...]
I had students here in Hyderabad gather data on rents, and then we put together a valuation pro forma. We determined that the present discounted value of flats here is roughly 40 percent of their sale price. I have been doing this sort of exercise since I first visited south Asia seven years ago, and [...]