Selling Real Estate – After black and White, it’s now turn of ‘brown money’
The online portal olx.com has come up with the term to describe goods that are no longer used and can be easily resold.
Urban Indians have stocked goods worth Rs 22,000 crore, which they no longer use and can be easily resold. Assessing the size and potential of used goods economy, online portal olx.com has termed this locked money as “brown money”.
A survey conducted by IMRB, a leading international market research and consultancy firm, and olx.com, an online marketplace portal When projected across urban India, the value is expected to be around Rs 22,000 crore.
Amarjit Batra, CEO olx.com said the value of the locked goods is so huge that people need to start thinking of its monetary value.
According to the survey, most Indians stock goods because they feel they will use it at a later date but that rarely happens. Second major reason was change of preferences and taste, even though the product was in good condition. Emotional attachment to the product was the third most popular reason.
This survey did not include Real Estate. For most of us Real Estate is the largest investment that we make in our life time, many a times because we bought it at high prices or because we bought it at low rates and it appreciated in value over time.
However, there comes a time when we have to take a good long look at our real estate portfolio and ask some hard questions :
1. Would we be better off if we sold this asset
2. Are we asset rich and liquidity poor
3. Can the needs and aspirations of other family members be fulfilled if we liquidated our real estate.
4. Are we overestimating the value of our assets
5. With advancing age, should we not sell and keep our assets in a liquid form.
6. If we are inclined to give to charity, it would be a good idea to sell our assets and give away the money in our life time.
As anybody who has sold their real estate in recent times will testify, it is difficult to sell , sometimes we do not get the price that we seek and many times in spite of lowering our expectation, we struggle to sell .
Unlike the assets enumerated in the OLX survey,real estate selling requires a special effort to sell and not withstanding the proliferation of online portals, the requirement to consult a real estate professional is very much a reality