Realtors sweat over assigned land deals

HYDERABAD: Realtors in the city are currently a nervous lot. Whether politicians will surrender the surplus or assigned land they have been squatting on for years is a moot point, it's the realtors who are feeling the heat of the latest political pot-boiler.
Many of them have been sitting on acres of assigned land bought at low prices, and now they fear that they might be badly hit too."It's nothing new in the trade. The buying and selling of assigned land is a common practice, particularly if one is looking for acres instead of a few square yards. But now we are confused. We will have to handle the issue if and when the government announces survey numbers and other details of assigned property and declares the earlier transactions void," realtor M Krishna Reddy said.
According to him, realtors have been dealing in assigned land for the past 20 years. But the panic has begun. Property dealers are reporting a significant rise in enquiries from sellers asking middlemen to find a buyer quickly.
"After the real estate boom reached its peak on the outskirts, we used to run behind owners requesting them to sell the land. They, however, usually preferred to wait for a better price. But in the past four days, it's the owners who have been frantically calling us," Mahesh Goud of Gayatri Properties said.
The prices are slipping too. For instance, in Ghatkesar the price is reported to have slipped to Rs 50 lakh an acre from Rs 65-70 lakh last fortnight. "At a time when multinational real estate companies are looking at Hyderabad for projects, any move that shakes the market would send a wrong signal," Goud claimed.
According to C Sudhakar of Chakilam Constructions: "By this time most of the sold assigned land is registered in somebody else's name. There are cases of realtors purchasing assigned land. While sellers have no problems, the buyers are a worried lot. Any decision to revert the transactions would cause huge losses to traders. We'll know the actual impact may be after two months."
However, Suchir India MD Y Kiron believed the current situation may help in market correction. "The political development will affect the market to some extent. But the market was due for a correction. The decision to take back assigned land is now triggering that correction," he said. Though market sources are not willing to guess the acreage of assigned land that has changed hands, they are certain about tens of crores being involved in such transactions.