In another casualty of the COVID-19 national lockdown, stamp duty collections in Maharashtra plummeted over 40 percent in a single month. Maharashtra collected property registrations of Rs 1,309 crores in March versus Rs 2,231 crores during the same period last year, data collated by Propstack from IGR Maharashtra showed (Office of the Inspector General of Registration and Controller of Stamps). Mumbai which contributes 30% of the stamp duty collections witnessed a 35% fall.
“This is largely because property registration offices were shut during the COVID19 lockdown,” said Sandeep Reddy, co-founder, Propstack – a real estate and financial data intelligence provider. ”There could be a temporary increase in property registrations once the offices resumes but over the next fiscal year 2021 we expect a significant decline in stamp duty collections for Maharashtra.”
The nationwide lockdown has forced builders to bring construction activity to a halt leading to large scale labour migration from urban to rural areas, which may take a long time to resolve. With most analysts saying India would likely grow at around 2% fears have risen over large scale salary and job cuts which would impact the rel estate sector.
The rise in Covid-19 cases and the 21-day lockdown announced by the government are likely to cause large-scale disruption to businesses. The full impact from the Covid-19 outbreak on growth and delinquencies would be visible from Q1FY21, experts say. The lockdown began on March 25.K
According to RBI data at the end of January, banks have an outstanding exposure of Rs 11 lakh crore to the micro, small and medium enterprises (MSME) sector and Rs 7.37 lakh crore to the NBFC sector. Banks have also lent Rs 3.73 lakh crore to the manufacturing sector, Rs 2.27 lakh crore to the commercial real estate sector, Rs 1.41 lakh crore to the transport sector and over Rs 45,000 crore to the tourism and hotels segment.
A Crisil review of 120 companies in the airline, hotel, tourism, mall, organised brick and mortar retail, multiplex and restaurant sectors led to rating action on 81 companies–22 were downgraded, 40 saw downward revision in rating outlook, and the remaining 19 were put on negative rating watch.
