HYDERABAD: The steady rise in Covid-19 cases has started slow down work in the city’s real estate sector.
Industry insiders say that while construction activity has remained unaffected — labourers are mostly not opting for tests -- a 25% to 30% drop in attendance among other staff, including engineers and architects, is resulting in delays in launching new projects and completing other due diligence.
Speaking to TOI,
Ashwin Rao
, managing partner of Akshara Group said: “Absenteeism is being reported among the 25% regular employees who are responsible for office work. Also, many government employees are affected which has delayed the process of procuring permissions . In our case, our architect is down with Covid-19 and the whole office is closed.” The other problem — access to resources.
“There is a delay in the availability of overall resources. Thankfully, though, there has so far not been an urgency for steel, cement, sand, bricks etc,” said
Veera Babu, managing director, Cushman & Wakefield, for Hyderabad & East India . Builders now hope there’s no lockdown in the offing.
“That would directly hitus with additional wages and loan interests to be incurred during the delay period,” said
Chaitanya Kumar
, director of Eco Infra group .
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