The answer to the question – if you’re under 35, unmarried and not working for a multinational firm – is “most probably not, not in Delhi”.

That, anyway, is what realtors and real estate consultants of Delhi-NCR say. They haven’t come across a single, single individual wanting to buy a home. All echoed a spouse’s income as paramount to being able to afford a home.

Sunil Pandey, partner at a real estate consultancy firm dealing with projects in Noida, Greater Noida, Yamuna Expressway and Indirapuram, says they may have dealt with 2-3 per cent unmarried people, but all of them were on the verge of getting hitched, and would be managing the down payment from their parents or in-laws. Married couples in the ages of 35 to 45 were the largest group buying homes.

Diane Ponnukannu, an IT sector employee, wants to invest in a home but is currently unable to as she can’t shell out the money for the down payment. And then there’s the commitment to repay the loan over 15 years, which she says would impact her budget.

How do young home-buyers manage the down payment? She believes those who can do so are “from a well-off background, like many of my friends who have bought flats with help from their families”. Many of us don’t have that kind of backup and some don’t have such generous parents.

She currently lives in a two-bedroom home paying a rent of Rs 16,000 per month. The flat’s market price is around Rs 55 lakh, and those who can afford such flats, according to Ponnukannu, are those with spousal support. Else people have to look for cheaper options, which do not come with the best amenities and location.

Aren’t there plenty of affordable homes being offered in advertisements? There is a burgeoning of properties in the NCR region which are projected as affordable homes with good infrastructure and amenities. Properties in Noida Extension, especially, have been calling out to people with flats under construction being sold for Rs 3,500-3,800 per sqft. Gaursons properties, which has a massive reign on the infrastructure of the area, sells homes at an even lower rate, for Rs 3,200-3,500 per sqft.

Pandey says that Gaursons has already delivered 25,000 homes! And in Noida Extension to Greater Noida there are already 18,000 families registered. He estimates that by this year-end, almost one lakh homes will be ready. But are people moving in at that rate? Or are homes just lying vacant?

Pandey’s dealings make him believe that people are moving in herds to the suburbs. This has also had a great effect on rental prices, which have gone down by 20 per cent in Noida and Indirapuram. This means good times for those living on rent. Now, a two-bedroom flat can be rented for anywhere between Rs 8,000 and 14,000 per month. It sounds like the perfect reason for someone to continue staying on rent.

Like Saurav Barua, who works in advertising, and doesn’t feel the need to buy a home.

Giving a long-drawn argument, he says he doesn’t have to pay maintenance cost, and while a two-bedroom house in south Delhi would cost him Rs 20,000 to rent, it would be a whopping Rs 1 crore to buy. But, “it’ll be paying only Rs 20 lakh in rent over 10 years and Rs 96 lakh over 40 years,” he adds, with such precision that it’s clear he’s done these calculations before.

When reminded that the market rates in that span of time would not stay the same, he comes up with another reason. “If you keep Rs 1 crore for eight years in a savings scheme, it’ll become Rs 2 crore. In 16 years, it’ll become Rs 4 crore and in 24…”

What he might do with the money is anyone’s guess, but many unlike him do believe in the security that your own home provides.

Take married couple Kuldeep Soreng and Pompi Sangma, who live in a two-bedroom apartment in Malviya Nagar. They think about buying a home every single day.

Soreng admits that it didn’t make sense to them, shelling out Rs 20,000 every month for rent when they could be paying this amount as EMI for their own home. But unable to pay the lump sum down payment, which would be about Rs 5-6 lakh, they’ve had to live in their “tiny place, which costs a lot due to its location”.

In south Delhi’s Khanpur, a two BHK flat is available for Rs 26 lakh on 99acres.com. This was the cheapest find on the home selling website, then there’s one in Mehrauli for a little over Rs 26 lakh and a home in Chhatarpur for Rs 33 lakh. They are pretty basic and more importantly, in unauthorised colonies, for which legal registry cannot be done and loans are barred by banks.

Soreng and Sangma know that NCR would have cheaper options for them – he gives the example of his friend who bought a two-bedroom home for just Rs 24 lakh, in a place called Mandi Gaon on the outskirts of Gurugram – but the security aspect is uncertain.

Locations in Gurugram are predictably priced much higher. Raj Arora, a property dealer, said that most of the flats he has sold in the DLF area were to those moving from Delhi, working in the corporate offices of Gurugram.

A flat in the city’s Golf Course Road would cost approximately 10,000-30,000 per sqft. While in the Golf Course Extension area, he says a flat can be bought for Rs 8,000-9,000 per sqft.

A better option for younger people would perhaps then be Sohna Road which has ready-to- move apartments at Rs 6,500 per sqft. Vivek Gupta, another property dealer, says he has flats available for sale in the Sohna Road area starting from Rs 80 lakh for two bedrooms and Rs 1.4 crore for three bedrooms.

In the same locations, the rentals are Rs 25,000-30,000 for a two-bedroom home to Rs 35,000 for a three-bedroom home. But the road is in dire need of traffic management, with huge jams a daily affair after 6 pm.

The sub-city of Dwarka, which has a steadily climbing population, doesn’t come too cheap either. But many do prefer living here and being inside Delhi than venturing into Noida or Gurugram. Group housing society flats are available for Rs 1 crore onwards.

It is clear that in the entire NCR region, homes are being built by the score, and there are certainly many who can inhabit them with our city bursting at the seams. But are people willing to move to places that are not as secure as their inner city neighbourhoods? And does owning a home seem something tangible for all, with the growing disproportionate wealth among citizens?

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How your loan is sanctioned

Once you ask for a home loan, the bank will ask for salary slips (varying from three to six months), your income tax returns of two years, and your KYC documents. Once all this is done, the bank will check your credit history via CIBIL.

Your loan will be sanctioned after seeing your monthly earnings, and the amount which will be left over after all deductions like tax, investments, and also the EMI incurred on the loan. The take-home amount after the deductions should leave you with 50 per cent of your earnings.

Some banks in the private sector may be more relaxed on the take-home amount.

While many people want a loan from public sector banks as their processing charges are nominal and there are no hidden costs, the private sector entices home-buyers with their eagerness to give loans and the hassle-free nature of it.

When fraud strikes

Dillina Marak lives with her mother, who is a government employee. Her father passed away some years ago, but her mother could retain the government flat they live in, in the heart of the city. Marak says she was determined to buy a home so she and her mother would be secure once retirement came calling. Marak thought she found the best opportunity in one of Amrapali Group’s projects, the Adarsh Awas Yojna.

(The Amrapali Group is a real estate company among others like the Jaypee Group, Supertech and Unitech who have been taken to the Supreme Court by home-buyers, for not delivering their homes, for refund of payment, quality of construction, and other violations. There are also insolvency cases against the former two.)

It started with the struggle to get a loan for which she ran from “pillar to post”. Now to ensure that all her money is returned, she has again been running around. A home of her own seems like a distant dream, nowhere close to being delivered by mid-2019 (as scheduled), with not a single foundation stone laid.

Even in her fight to get justice she feels sidelined. “Society doesn’t treat a single woman with seriousness. They think, oh this is a modern girl, who foolishly bought herself a house and is now in trouble.”

Marak always wanted to have a house of her own, and she thought to herself that with a steady job and enough money to pay the EMI, the time was right. But alas, “Ever since I’ve bought this home, my life has been troublesome”.

She points questions at how the public sector bank which gave her the loan was not aware that Amrapali didn’t have enough money to complete the project. “Back then I thought, the bank has okayed the loan, which must mean the builders have been checked and are trustworthy.” That’s the kind of trust people have in government banks, Marak says.

She, along with other home-buyers have held protests, met the District Magistrate, all MLAs of Noida, and even filed 13 FIRs against the Amrapali Group. The DM said it wasn’t the fault of the government that they bought the homes. The MLAs gave assurances but did nothing, and the FIRs amount to nothing.

The ray of hope came when the case against the Jaypee Group appeared in the Supreme Court. After some consultation, lawyers asked them to “wait for the verdict on the group. But we couldn’t. We were running out of patience and feared that the MD, Anil Sharma, would run away like Vijay Mallya, so some filed a petition in the SC.”

But she’s still worried. The cases being heard are for only a few projects under the Group – which has liabilities of about Rs 3,000 crore to official agencies and owes more than Rs 1,000 crore to about 10 banks. She isn’t sure when justice will reach an ordinary person like her.

This story was first published in the Patriot.