In most of the cases, the housing co-operative societies buy land in large chunks. For taxation or legal reasons, individuals normally avoid purchase of very large sized plots of land for residential purposes. When analyzing the transactions in Real Estate Kochi is witnessing the domination of the major business groups with phenomenal incomes. Not only that with the rise in land prices the common people cannot afford to own land in the prominent city centers.
Also higher average size in farther circles of the city could be a reflection of some large speculative transactions in those areas. In the absence of reliable information, this will remain a very weak conclusion. The seller might have sold some of the transactions with speculative objective. It is, however, impossible for us to distinguish between speculative non-speculative transactions from the data given by the registration authorities because in a majority of the cases, the actual amount at which the transaction has taken place is not mentioned.
For people with small and marginal incomes it is increasingly difficult to buy large chunks of land. Due to the rising taxes on vacant properties, people who owned large chunks of land that was earlier used for agriculture are now finding it difficult to pay the taxes, when the government imposed higher tax rates on such vacant plots. Actually the plots have been left vacant because even those people who wanted to cultivate crops couldn’t do anything because of the adverse conditions prevailing in the city.
With land price moving above one crore rupees for a cent of land in areas like Marine Drive and M.G.Road, Kochi has now entered the exclusive club of the metro cities where land prices are often quoted in crores and not in lakhs. Thus land value can be literally calculated for its value in gold in these prominent city centers.