In actual fact, the factors on which you should buy a home must be:
• Price: Can you afford it, are you getting what you paid for according to the prevailing property market rates, and have you factored in all the hidden and future costs?
• Size: Is the home large enough for you now as well as your future needs?
• Locality: Is it safe for your, does it have the right conveniences within reach and can you feasibly travel to and from your place of work from there every day?
• Investment value: Will it appreciate sufficiently to enable you to sell it at some point in the future and move to another home? Is the building new enough to prevent investment erosion due to age-related depreciation of the building?
All these factors are most readily visible when you buy a new property rather than a resale one. Properties in new projects being sold by reputed developers provide you with a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) opportunity. While it may not be anywhere close to your original 'dream home', it is a fresh, blank canvas with sufficient potential to paint a realistic, real-time dream on.
By the same coin, many properties on the resale market are pictures drawn on the canvas of other people's dreams. Often, you have to pay for things you don't really want and inherit structural or design aspects that you cannot refashion to match your own vision.
Arvind Jain is the Managing Director of Pride Group
