Transparency up in real estate
India is among the countries in the Asia Pacific region that have shown the biggest improvement in real estate transparency, says the latest Global Real Estate Transparency Index drawn up by the firm Jones Lang LaSalle and LaSalle Investment Management, its real estate investment management subsidiary. 0The biggest improvers in the Asia Pacific region were India, China and Vietnam, informs the real estate services firm, which has pointed out that emerging markets had signi
ficantly improved their levels of real estate transparency.
However, the gains were ‘relatively modest’ for most countries in the region, particularly when compared with the past and the recent gains made by countries in Europe, West Asia and North Africa.
The index compared transparency in 82 real estate markets around the world. Transparency levels have been improving globally, as governments seek to streamline regulatory and legal hurdles to aid cross-border movement of capital and corporate facilities.
It now places India’s tier-1 and -2 cities in the semi-transparent category, which includes countries such as Taiwan, South Korea, Thailand and the Philippines from the region and China’s tier-I cities. India’s tier-3 cities fall under the category with low transparency and the other countries in this group include Indonesia, Macau, Vietnam and tier-2 and -3 cities in China. China has exhibited the greatest improvement, moving up to the semi-transparent category and is now considered more transparent than India. “Notwithstanding this, the two emerging giants of the region remain very close in terms of overall real estate transparency,” the firm noted. Anuj Puri, chairman and country head, India, Jones Lang LaSalle, said the issue of real estate transparency at the city level was gaining importance as real estate investors and corporates venture into new regions in their search for higher returns or cost-effective locations.
International investors and corporates were moving into secondary and tertiary cities that had not been traditional targets of the real estate community.
The Australian and U.S. real estate markets continue to remain among the most transparent in the world, while Canada now ranks as the world’s most transparent commercial real estate market. While these countries rank ‘high’ in terms of transparency, countries such as Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia and Japan fall in the ‘transparent’ category. The category of ‘semi-transparent’ countries follows, with those in two other categories — low and opaque —making up the rest of the list.
The steady improvement in transparency, particularly over the last four years, has been closely linked to globalisation, with the movement of both capital and corporations around the world enhancing the need for information about markets. “It had also created an incentive for governments to streamline bureaucratic practices which prevent the free flow of capital into and out of global markets,” a company analyst said.
T. RAMACHANDRAN
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