KOCHI: The Government's green signal to the Smart City project has made a surprisingly quick impact on the real estate sector in the Kakkanad area, where the project will be located.

Overnight, real estate prices have gone up. In a couple of hours after Wednesday's announcement by Chief Minister V.S. Achuthanandan that the Smart City project would be inked by April 30, the real estate sector warmed up and middlemen and brokers got active. In just one day, one broker reported, there was at least a 10 per cent hike in the (speculative) price of real estate in Kakkanad area. He said this would go up further as the project gets materialised. Brokers, middlemen and developers are all excited about the project.

For nearly three years, the real estate sector has been banking on the Smart City to jack up land and house prices in the Kakkanad area, which has recorded the steepest rise in real estate prices. Until a few years back, Kakkanad, which used be full of paddy fields, hills and a dozen monasteries and nunneries, used to be a sleepy area. The arrival of Info Park and scores of apartment buildings and villa projects in its wake, changed the landscape. Hundreds of acres of paddy fields got transformed into real estate hot property.

The plan to locate Smart City in the Kakkanad area three years ago further boosted the real estate prices. Anticipating hefty value appreciation in the future, speculators bought up every available piece of land. But, following the CPI(M)'s, especially the then Leader of the Opposition V.S.Achuthanandan's opposition to the terms of the agreement with the Dubai company, the project got delayed. Over the past three years, there have been several ups and downs in the prospects of the projects. And, every time there was a positive development, the real estate prices in the entire Kakkanad area went up. When there was a setback, the prices fell. Wednesday's announcement of the Government clearing the project was the most positive development so far on the project and the middlemen, brokers and the property developers are in an upbeat mood.

Real estate agents

The real estate boom in the area (as well as across the State) has spawned a new class of brokers and middlemen. Because of the lure of easy money, a large number of educated and middle-class people have turned real-estate agents. Many of these agents have other full-time employment, including in the Government. Some of them are deep into speculative business — they buy small pieces of property at cheap rates, and after holding them for a while and making some facelifts, sell these at a much higher price. It is the speculators who are the happiest about the Chief Minister's announcement about the project.

Strangely, it will be the local residents, to be evicted from their homes and properties to locate the project, who would be the losers. They cannot gain from the real estate boom — they will get only a fraction of the market price for their lands, which the Government has acquired at very low prices. While other landowners as well as real estate actors would make a killing, the local residents who would actually provide land for the project would be victimised. "We would never to be able to find cheap land to buy anywhere in Kerala with the money we get for our land acquired for the project," a small landowner at Edachira said.

Meanwhile, environmentalists are worried that the beautiful countryside with long stretches of paddy fields and hills would be gone forever. Not just the land to be acquired for the project, but the whole area surrounding it would turn into real estate. Because of the boom in real estate caused by the Smart City, the paddy fields in Thrikkakara and nearby panchayats would vanish.

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