Hyderabad real estate

Well, I am following Hyderabad real estate for the last two years. I am following it too closely (ha ha) these days, hoping to catch the bottom and buy an apartment in (or around) gachibowli (it's the area in Hyderabad where most of the IT companies are concentrated).

I don't want to go into the details of trends, ups and downs etc....but one thing I want to share is that - the builders are becoming more and more cunning. They are resorting to tricks which some times are laughable and other times - quite frankly you can say 'genious'. Some of the tricks are -
1. Giving a discount of 10 - 20%. Hey, the prices are down by as much as 30 - 40%, don't fool around still.....

2. Reduce the Per SFT price, but they catch you in some other place - See the examples:
Mantri celestia - You get match box size apartment, it's not even luxury - it's going to look like governement quarters. And get this, you get only 65% of the area - rest is common area. Go and do the math and decide if the price is right or not.

3. Catch you on extras - You pay for club membership, pay extra for additional car parkings, water , electricity etc.... costing any where between 4 to 7 lakhs. YOu may get a discount on the per SFT price, you still pay all these amounts - which quickly til the balance. You might ask - well these prices are there even before - but think, are they inline with market and value?
You are paying 1 lakh for water connection? If there are 1000 apartments, then all toghether they get 10 crores for water connection? For small to medium builders (so called standalone apartments), you don't pay any thing - how they are providing water connection?
Same goes for electricity......

4. You pay upfront, not depending on the progress - basically you are giving them interest free (which is hard to get these days from banks, even if you want to pay interest). So, they take money from you - sit on it for few months/years and then start the construction. In the mean time, you'll pay bank interest.... Once they start the construciton, they hike the prices saying - "see we started construction".