Unsold home inventory drops 17% but remains high at nearly 6 lakh, Mumbai leads followed by NCR and Bengaluru

India's property is slowly recovering as unsold inventory levels dropped 17% from its peak of 2014, Knight Frank India said. Unsold inventory, however, currently stands at 5,96,044 units. 

Knight Frank said that new launches fell 41% -- lowest in seven years while sales were at its 5 year lows, down 11% in the first half of the current year. Affordable housing, however, is seeing greated interest backed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi as 71% launches in the given period were in the price category of less than Rs 50 lakh as against 52% of last year. 

Knight Frank said that National Capital Region (NCR) and Ahmedabad in Gujarat are the worst hit when it comes to launches as they witnessed 79% and 73% decline, respectively. Chennai, on the other  hand, saw a 4% rise in launches of new projects while Mumbai saw  62% rise in new launches.

Affordable Housing

Knight Frank said that affordable housing is seeing greater interest as new launches announced in the first half of the current calendar year saw a 71% rise as against 52% in the same period of last year. 

The report further said that unsold inventory currently is the lowest in four years because of this lack of new launches as builders focus on selling existing homes. 

NCR continues to be the worst market with 1,80,370 unsold homes with an inventory of 17.8 quarters. 

Mumbai has the highest unsold inventory of 1,38,653 homes with 8.8 quarters needed to sell these. 

Bengaluru and Kolkata have unsold home units of 1,14,064 and 39,114 with 10 and 10.6 quarters needed to liquidate these, respectively.