Decoding real estate beyond noise.
Earth
Joined August 2023
- Tweets9.6K
- Following657
- Followers10.3K
- Likes20K
Property Decoder retweeted
This is a hot topic among Indian elites and it's a fair one. My husband and I tried multiple places -- Delhi, Himachal, Goa, Mumbai, Bangalore -- before eventually moving to London. I remember a phonecall I had with an old friend who had moved to Seattle way back (while I turned down a similar offer) -- "I know what you guys are seeking in the mountains in India. You won't find it there. You need to move here."
Manu correctly points out all that is wrong about the Indian cities, although I find his analyses of other places quite shallow. "Manali is overrated", "Kerala is boring" etc. are lazy arguments in what could otherwise have been a good essay.
Re. the price of coffee in London -- yes the rupee is weak and as a new immigrant in London I've certainly felt it deep in my veins BUT the coffee culture in India isn't cheap either? Indian coffee prices are in fact comparable, and when you consider that outside a Blue Tokai or Third Wave you'll find open drains and the likes, it becomes clear that the problem isn't just that the rupee is weak, it's that the cost of living in urban India is starting to get closer to that in western countries without comparable infrastructure improvement.
That said, I do find Manu's complaints about having no choice but to return to India interesting. The truth is that money and credibility does offer many Indians pathways to move to other countries. What pulls Indian elites back (including us if and when we do) are reasons that will need much deeper self-awareness and a separate essay. :-)
If you know how to live you have nowhere to live in India
'I can now live where I want, in clean air, running through nature, walking through urban beauty, living in private austerity and public splendour. This means I have to leave India. Because most of the country is a mofussil hellhole in the smog.'
Read free on my Substack.
manujoseph.substack.com/p/if…
Property Decoder retweeted
After 17 years of calling Gurgaon home, today broke something inside me. For the first time, I felt an overwhelming sense of grief and sheer helplessness just stepping out of my door to pick kid from school.
A few hours of rain shouldn't reduce a "millennium city" into a stranded, chaotic nightmare. The city didn't fail us ,the system, the administration.
For nearly two decades we have paid our taxes, built our lives, and hoped for better, only to be met with the same negligence year after year from concerned team.
We are not just commuters stuck in traffic; we are parents with our kids,we are children with our elderly parents, we are spouse, we are siblings we are human beings. We matter.Our lives matter. Our children’s futures and our family's safety matter.
We cannot stay quiet anymore while our dignity is washed away with every downpour. It is time they hear us, loud and clear.
@mcgurgaon
@OfficialGMDA
@HSVP_Haryana
Property Decoder retweeted
For those who think that the current lot of bureaucrats & politicians can fix the woes of major urban cities: the master-planning (if done at all) 30-40 years ago for today was devoid of foresight & anticipation of rapid population increases due to migration from smaller towns & rural India. And cities like Gurgaon were blatantly pillaged by successive political parties (since late 1980s) and powerful, rapacious builders (names need not be taken) - land use indiscriminately changed from agriculture to low-rise homes to high rise commercial buildings - with no care about building wider roads (that extra land was handed over to builders and others), sewage / rainwater drains (the money earned from CLU went mostly to the politicians pockets, and little was used for infrastructure). It is too late to undo this damage in cities like Gurugram and then in several other more prominent metros e.g Bengaluru & Chennai @narendramodi @HardeepSPuri @RahulGandhi @TVKVijayHQ @Dev_Fadnavis
What can still be done is to hire the best local or international urban town planners to draw pragmatic town plans for the next 30 years, have the courage to demolish the old & dysfunctional buildings & enclave, ask the large land hoarders (PSUs, Railway, Defence, Central & State Gov'ts, etc.) in prominent metros to release land for more productive use, invite global capital to develop (rather than mostly local developers / exploiters), and privatize / make municipal corporations more accountable. – at Gurgaon, India
Property Decoder retweeted
Next up,
India must show that Industrial Plots are for manufacturing not for speculative investing!
Property Decoder retweeted
Very intriguing when few people act surprised that I'm also in favour of environment/trees/open spaces.
The focus of my profession is real estate. And I have an interest in infrastructure. But that doesn't mean - nothing else matters.
Eventually City > Real estate.
Property Decoder retweeted
What a Swiss–French visionaries imagined 78 years ago still puts us to shame. Le Corbusier and M. S. Randhawa showed what real city planning looks like.
India doesn’t lack land, climate advantage, or natural resources it suffers from poor planning. Across most of the country, except a few well-designed cities and pockets, we treat nature as a hurdle instead of an asset.
Shade-giving native trees are replaced with decorative plants in the name of “modern development.” Roads get wider, concrete keeps expanding and then we wonder why cities feel 5–10°C hotter every summer.
We don’t need more concrete jungles.
We need smarter, climate-conscious cities.
The real question is:
Are we building for the next 5 years… or the next 50? 👍🏻
#Chandigarh #LeCorbusier
Property Decoder retweeted
Two Indias - one talks about 40 crore for retirement, other digs up graves of family members for 20k.
Property Decoder retweeted
Financial independence has three legs:-
1. enough corpus,
2. enough health to enjoy it,
3. enough relationships to share it.
Most FIRE planning covers only the first.
Health is a compounding asset too invest early, the returns show up at 65. Neglect it, and no corpus fixes what is broken.
Property Decoder retweeted
If I have 40Cr @ 60, I can earn safe 30l a month and it will be very difficult to spend that. Just have fun when u can at the right age. A Ferrari at 70 is of no value. U will need a driver and still want him to drive at 40.
Property Decoder retweeted
Now only Mars is left to be littered, rest remotest of areas are now littered by Indians. Mana village, the home to the mystical Saraswati River, such clean waters now being turned into a pile of garbage.
If PM wants every place to be clean like Sikkim, time to introduce a special force for cleanliness, else nothing will change.
Property Decoder retweeted
Imagine being an ultra HNI and not even able to enjoy fruits in India. Forget about clean air and water.
Meanwhile, poor people in developed countries breathe fresh air, drinkable tap water, and delicious fruits.
Quality of life of poor people in developed countries seems better than rich and affluent in India.
Property Decoder retweeted
Of course India must grow rich. A lot of the contempt Indians face abroad and online is downstream of India still being a $2,800 per capita GDP country. If that number were $28,000, much of the casual racism would swiftly evaporate.
But asking successful Indians in America to return out of pleas of "Bharat mata needs you" is not being serious.
Why would someone who built an organized, high agency, dollar-income life abroad move back to poisoned air, unreliable water, adulterated food, broken roads, municipal collapse, low-trust daily life, scams at every corner, and a state that treats entrepreneurs like suspects?
People return to opportunity, not guilt. Build a country where clean air, safe food, good schools, honest contracts, fast courts and predictable governance are normal. Then the talent will come back on its own.
Open letter to Indians in America.
--
Dear brothers and sisters from Bharat:
Like I did 37 years ago, you arrived in America with no money but with a good education and cultural heritage from Bharat. You achieved outstanding success. America was good to us. For that we must remain grateful - gratitude is our Bharatiya way.
Yet today, a significant number of Americans, may be not the majority but not too far from it either, believe that Indians "take away" American jobs and our success in America was unfairly earned.
You may think the next election will fix this, but your choice would be between people who hate our Bharatiya civilisation and people who hate civilisation itself. That is the "hard right" vs "woke left" battle. You are mere bystanders to that conflict.
Meanwhile there is one thing that is true now and will be true in the future: the respect Indians command world-wide will substantially depend on the fortunes of India herself. If India remains poor, the woke left will give us moral lectures with pity and the hard right, different moral lectures with scorn ("hellhole") and we must not confuse either with respect.
Respect in today's world, along with prosperity and security, comes from one source: a nation's technological prowess. India produces sufficient brain power to achieve that prowess but alas we exported so much of that talent, particularly to America. As we develop that prowess in India, our civilisational strength will assert itself.
As difficult as it is for many of you to contemplate this, please come back home. Bharat Mata needs your talent. Our vast youthful population needs the technology leadership you gained over the years to guide them towards prosperity. Let's do it with a missionary zeal.
Respectfully
Sridhar Vembu
Property Decoder retweeted
Dear Mr. Vembu,
I am welcome?
IIM professors told me otherwise when I tried to apply to come back to teach future managers cybersecurity as a risk management discipline, something I thought I could do for India by training future generations to lead Indian companies in a cyber-informed manner.
I was told to get another PhD in MIS to be worthy of teaching (I had a PhD in Computer Science from Stonybrook one of the top places in my field)
Basically they wanted to hire their own students (a practice frowned on internationally) and actively were condescending or passively dismissive to anyone who was not. And I had a privileged position from a desi lens, as my father had been a professor at the same institution.
I now do the same for one of world’s biggest medtech companies, wrote a book in the medical device space on this risk management concept extensively used in many other large medtech companies and I say this to preempt the “oh well you were not good enough”. Those who have known me on social media for two decades know that I am not the humble brag type.
(I also applied to private management institutes. One of them sent me an email a year later after I had applied asking me to appear for an interview in two days promising to pay me second class train fare from where I was, which I presume would be difficult from Chicago (that’s where I was then))
So all this sounds great on X but unless institutions change in India, away from old babu culture, people who want to come back on their own (I already had my green card so I wasn’t trying to come because of visa issues, but from a genuine desire to leave a legacy) will find themselves blocked and demotivated.
Thanks
Open letter to Indians in America.
--
Dear brothers and sisters from Bharat:
Like I did 37 years ago, you arrived in America with no money but with a good education and cultural heritage from Bharat. You achieved outstanding success. America was good to us. For that we must remain grateful - gratitude is our Bharatiya way.
Yet today, a significant number of Americans, may be not the majority but not too far from it either, believe that Indians "take away" American jobs and our success in America was unfairly earned.
You may think the next election will fix this, but your choice would be between people who hate our Bharatiya civilisation and people who hate civilisation itself. That is the "hard right" vs "woke left" battle. You are mere bystanders to that conflict.
Meanwhile there is one thing that is true now and will be true in the future: the respect Indians command world-wide will substantially depend on the fortunes of India herself. If India remains poor, the woke left will give us moral lectures with pity and the hard right, different moral lectures with scorn ("hellhole") and we must not confuse either with respect.
Respect in today's world, along with prosperity and security, comes from one source: a nation's technological prowess. India produces sufficient brain power to achieve that prowess but alas we exported so much of that talent, particularly to America. As we develop that prowess in India, our civilisational strength will assert itself.
As difficult as it is for many of you to contemplate this, please come back home. Bharat Mata needs your talent. Our vast youthful population needs the technology leadership you gained over the years to guide them towards prosperity. Let's do it with a missionary zeal.
Respectfully
Sridhar Vembu
Property Decoder retweeted
We are basically the polar opposite of the Japanese when it comes to public workmanship.
They obsess over finish, precision, alignment, small details, and attach personal honour to the craft itself.
Here the entire philosophy is: “kaam ho gaya na?”
No one gives two fucks whether the output looks decent, lasts 3 months, or makes the city look like a real place. Find the easiest jugaad, slap some paint, close the file. Become Vishwaguru.
Property Decoder retweeted
People can justify almost any absurd housing prices in India, but those questioning it are often pointing to something deeper that even a ₹100 crore home in India can still fail to deliver the kind of everyday livability that a ₹5-10 crore home in London can offer.
Look at the contradiction.
Some of the wealthy buying at ₹1-2 lakh per sq ft, to live among similar high-income circles inside gated bubbles, are often making more status/signalling or a escape-driven purchases than “overall livability” decisions... as polluted air, flooded entry/exit points during monsoons, and the moment they step outside, broken infra, litter, dust, and urban chaos continue to haunt them.
Even a top builder selling ₹50-100 crore homes recently said that kids living here inhaling toxic air is not life.
So this question naturally comes to the mind... why grind so much just to buy such highly overvalued traps, only to end up breathing poison?
Are clean air, functional roads, reliable drainage, walkable surroundings, and dignified public spaces not luxuries worth considering too?
And if you notice how "rich living" in India have just been reduced to the size of clubhouse! 😀
Absurd pricing is often defended through scarcity, branding, or status signaling. But a time may come when real livability factors begin to matter more than speculative narratives.
When that shift happens, many current valuations may be questioned.
Like we are seeing in financial markets, some experts have started questioning expensive Indian assets. Even though other experts keep defending them with new narratives, but growing awareness of better valued global options is pushing investors toward better-valued markets.
Similarly, people are now increasingly feeling that many top global cities offer better livability... cleaner air, great public transport, lower public-friction living etc with even sometimes cheaper or better-value homes than premium parts of India.
So those who can move are already choosing better places, as many no longer see the worth in grinding here just to afford even a ₹5 crore home.
But yes, prices may not correct quickly due to this, but as people becoming more aware and started comparing livability vs housing prices globally, local pricing stories have started weakening, which is why new narratives keep getting invented to defend them.
Therefore, it will be interesting to see how long Indian realty can keep holding onto such narratives without meaningfully upgrading overall livability.
Property Decoder retweeted
Whosoever this woman is, extremely well done.
These regular road blockings for dharnas, protests, and VIP visits are a nuisance. When will political parties realise that not a single new voter will be added through such methods? In fact, people stuck in traffic will hate you, you may lose more than you gain.
Specifically to the BJP: move on from the women’s reservation issue. Nobody cares about it. No woman, except maybe the party cadre, is angry that the bill won’t be implemented right now. It’s not going to fetch you any votes. There is already too much traffic in India; don’t make it worse by blocking roads for pointless theatrics.
Coming back to this woman, I’m sure the deep state experts will soon find out her political allegiance and label her a deep-state agent planted by George Soros to dilute the women’s reservation bill issue, because shooting the messanger is easier than addressing the message.
Property Decoder retweeted
Fire Sprinklers in India: A Scam That Kills
The video below is misleading.
That person is holding a flame directly to the bulb.
In a real fire, heat takes minutes....sometimes hours to reach that height and temperature.
By then, nothing is left to save.
Smoke detectors should trigger sprinklers. They don't. That's a separate failure.
---
Why sprinklers don't work
> Consultants mandate UL & FM licensed sprinklers.
> ISI means nothing here.
> But almost every site installs unlicensed ones anyway.
> Nobody checks. Nobody is accountable.
All sprinklers — licensed or not — come from China.
> Licensed ones are brass. They oxidize but they work.
> Unlicensed ones are zinc and lead. A child can snap them with bare hands.
> The bulbs inside aren't certified either. They may not even activate in a fire.
The price difference? ₹150–200 per sprinkler.
That's what your life is worth in this system.
---
Why fire systems exist in India
> Not for safety. For the NOC.
> Most buildings rent the equipment, get the certificate, and return it.
> The ones that keep it? They use the hose to wash cars.
Or flush the lines once a year and call it maintenance.
---
If there's ever a fire in an Indian building.....don't wait for the sprinklers.
Run
Property Decoder retweeted
What happens when a property co-owner dies in India? Does the survivor get full ownership or is he left in a legal tangle? Yes, a tangle - if you haven't done the paperwork. Here's what you need to know: 🧵
Property Decoder retweeted
A guy bought a 55,000 sqft factory in Detroit for $700K.
In India, you’d spend that just fighting approvals, land titles, and utilities before even thinking about production.
We don’t lack entrepreneurs.
We make it unnecessarily hard for them to exist.
Property Decoder retweeted
The Lewis turning point assumes the system underneath actually works. It doesn’t work if corruption progressively seeps in and fills all the margin gaps.
For eg in India land isn’t priced fairly by demand. It’s priced based on a subjective system of corruption. So there's no true cost of land.
Everyday costs are layered - permits for your business, weak public transport, poor access to affordable food for workers - which means extra costs that workers don’t get to keep, security and pilferage costs - which mean you can never rest and subjective taxation, where a local taxman can always fine you unless you pay up in other ways. It all adds up, so there’s very little margin for wage growth.
India per capita ~$2.5k, bike $800 → ~0.32x income. China per capita ~$12.5k, bike $800 → ~0.06x.
Now the question should be why the bike costs the same (or less) in China while the burden in India is ~5x higher.
A dysfunctional system - bureaucracy, law and order, and administrative friction - keeps extracting at every step. That extraction eats into any margins - and thus upward mobility - so my view is that even higher wages will not translate into meaningful improvement anytime soon and this anguish will be manipulated by various interested parties for their own petty agendas.
So to solve this - India must decisively solve for corruption in public life.
Why won't wages grow?
In India, wages won't grow much until we hit the Lewis Transition.
The Lewis Transition point is when a developing country exhausts all the supply of rural labor that wants to move out of agriculture and into manufacturing.
Because India has 40% of its labor in agriculture, there's still a lot more labor that needs to be drained out of agriculture and into industry.
There's still a decade to go for wages to rise sustainably.