NEW DELHI: Smaller towns and cities closer to metros and industrial hubs are seeing significant housing demand on the back of lower land cost and increased prosperity. This is in sync with the earnings of HDFC, which cited growth in retail loans across smaller towns for posting good numbers for the third quarter.
According to the data with National Housing Bank (NHB), there is a price appreciation in cities such as Lucknow, Surat, Guwahati, Chandigarh, Raipur, Faridabad, Patna, Ahmedabad in July-September quarter 2013, while Delhi and Bangalore prices were down. Pune was flat and Mumbai marginally up during the same period compared to April-June 2013 quarter.
Analysts believe that land as well as construction cost is high in metros and in Gurgaon and Noida. Even the number of approvals which a developer has to take for launching a project is high in such areas, which explains the rush of developers to small cities and towns.