New Delhi: The Housing finance regulator, National Housing Bank has launched index much like the BSE benchmark Sensex to track the price movement of real estate particularly residential housing for five cities.

Finance Minister P Chidambaram launched the index called the NHB Residex for five cities- Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Bangalore and Bhopal, which will operate on a pilot basis.

"It's a small beginning. It's launched for five cities. We need national index. It will help in flow of capital (in real estate)," Chidambaram was quoted by PTI.

The index will cover the movement in the real estate prices over a period of five years on spatial basis. The index movement will also largely depend on the size of the dwelling unit in each of these five cities.

The year 2001 has been taken as the base-year for the index to be comparable with the wholesale price-based index and consumer price index.

It will show increasing trend of prices in all the five cities, doubling since 2001 and for Bangalore the rise in prices was almost three times.

NHB proposes extend the index index to 35 cities having population of more than one million in next six months.

Subsequently, the coverage of the index will be enlarged to include 63 cities before coming out with nationwide representative index.

With excerpts from a PTI report

Source: www.IBNlive.com

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