As India’s currency plummeted against the U.S. dollar, Gulf-based Indians are avoiding gold purchases or selling their gold to raise cash for property bargains back home.
“Since early 2013 when the Rupee started tumbling, we have been receiving ample demand from Indian residents for property loans,” said Shabbir Gunerwala, a loan officer working for Indian bank ICICI in Dubai.
Santosh Tandel, the regional head Middle East of real estate firm Indiabulls, said, “Given the favorable exchange rates in the past months, remittances back to India have seen an upward trend.”
With over 1.3 million expats, Indians are the biggest group of foreigners living in the UAE which has a total population of 8.5 million people. Major Indian banks ICIC, Bank of Baroda and HDFC run branches in the Dubai and Abu Dhabi and offer crossover markets financing for non-resident Indians (NRIs), a general term for Indian nationals living abroad.
Because gold prices plummeted since the start of 2013 and real estate in India became cheaper from the perspective of Indian expats earning a salary in the UAE, more NRIs from the subcontinent take the opportunity to realize the dream of buying their own four walls in India, said Tandel.
Earlier in June this year, the three-day Indian Property Show in Dubai attracted 17,000 Indian expats who were spotting for the “right object” as over 100 developers from across India exhibited. The Indian Property became a huge success so that its organizers Sumansa Exhibition decided to hold three fairs per year in the Dubai World Trade Center’s convention center.
With 90 percent of Indians in the UAE coming originally from the south of India, real estate objects in Mumbai, Kochi, Bangalore and Chennai was demanded in particular, said Alok Anchan, manager sales with Mumbai’s biggest developer in relation to annual revenues.
