Housing finance regulator, National Housing Bank (NHB), is working on a complete revamp of its residential housing index or `Residex’. “We are working on a complete revamp of Residex and we are likely to come up with a revamped Residex over the next three years,” NHB’s managing director and chief executive, Sriram Kalyanaraman said.
“The new Residex will be having both, evaluated value and registered value, of a particular house. The NHB is also working on two more indices, which include rental index and building and construction material index,” he said, adding that “We have roped in realty research firm Liases Foras, for providing us inputs.”
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As of now, Residex is available for 26 cities. “We will be adding two more cities very shortly and will take it to 45 cities, over the next couple of years,” he said. “We are also working on automation of refinance, which may take less than a year to complete,” he said.
NHB is also working with various state governments, for rationalisation of stamp duty. “We are working with various state governments, towards rationalisation of stamp duty. We are telling the states to bring it down from existing 10% to 3%. If you lower the stamp duty, the volume will increase and this will help state governments to pare the losses incurred in the reduction of stamp duty,” he said.
Besides, NHB is also studying if the existing system of property insurance is viable for customers. Very few people know that property insurance covers only the construction cost of the property they own, said Kalyanaraman. To be completed in five months, the study is being done by the Hyderabad-based Administrative Staff College of India (ASCI) on behalf of the NHB. The idea, is to get the customer’s perspective on whether the insurance product is useful, he said.
