Nishant Joshi, 24, has been travelling to London with his family since he was 12, living with cousins or in hotels. A year ago, he decided to launch the Parisian fashion school Mod’Art International in India, and racked up frequent flyer miles by travelling to Europe nine times in the first year.
“Since I’ll have to continue to travel to London, it only makes sense for me to buy a house,” he says. Being part of the close-knit Gujarati community there, he has already found a place owned by a Gujarati lady who will soon be relocating to Kenya to be with her cousins. He plans to pay for his four-bedroom “semi-house” with a “buy to let” scheme from a bank.
“I’ll give a part of the house on rent and that money will go directly to the bank,” he says about the place in Kensington that costs about £400,000 (around Rs3.17 crore). “I love staying in London and since I have a lot of family and friends there, it’ll work like a second home for me,” he adds.
He’s the kind of person Lady Raine Spencer, a director of Harrods Estates Ltd, wants to woo. She was an exhibitor last month at Extravaganza 2008 Mumbai—an exhibition of luxury goods that included everything from jets to cigars, Scotch, yachts and cars. Despite the excitement caused by a life-size replica of Embraer’s Phenom 300 jet and the latest gleaming Maybach, international property agents were a category of exhibitors whose stalls saw heavy traffic, even without eye-catching displays.
The greying British countess, in a demure yellow and blue frock, sat in the Harrods Estates stall (the property division of London’s most famous store), with a Harrods teddy bear on her lap, and answered questions about the properties they sell in London and the surrounding countryside. The sale price of these homes is less than £3 million. “In the last few years, the percentage of Indian buyers has shot up to 12%. A few years ago it was about 4%,” she says. Almost 67% of Harrods Estates’ business comes from the West Asian, Russian, Chinese, French and Italian markets. Now, the Indian market is an important slice in that pie chart.
Indians, both expatriate and resident, are buying property abroad. Anuj Puri, chairman and country head, Jones Lang LaSalle Meghraj, says that Indians look at Dubai as a good investment option, while those who have children studying in the UK and the US buy homes there for convenience. Malaysia and Thailand are upcoming holiday home destinations. “A house on the beach in Pataya costs less than a similar one in Goa. Also, the infrastructure is better and one can get a mortgage of up to 80% of the value of property,” he says. Nothing comes in the way of you and that villa in Bangkok other than the ceiling of $100,000 per person (around Rs40 lakh) that the Reserve Bank of India allows us to repatriate each year.