The Hindu Business Line : Virtual realty

It might today sound fantastic that anyone could fork out as much as Rs 90,000 a month to rent 1,500 sq. feet in Adyar area in the city; or Rs 45,000 for an area of the same size in Velachery, a suburb.

But a check with former ‘tenants’ and ’landlords’ revealed that Rs 60 and Rs 30 per sq. ft a month are in fact conservative estimates of the ‘going rates’ that prevailed in Adyar and Velachery until just the other day, when 50 acres of prime property, located on arterial roads or commercial zones in the city, simply vanished into thin air, overnight, in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision ‘striking down’ illegal advertising hoardings in Chennai.

The 50-acre figure is a guess-timate. Official data are only available for the number of illegal hoardings removed (4,114, of which only 539 were concentrated in a few premium locations like T. Nagar, Nungambakkam High Road, Adyar and Parry’s).

A rough estimate of the surface area of these hoardings was arrived at by touring the photo galleries, using the known size of half a dozen select hoardings as a measuring rod.

Such fantastic rates of return on investments in virtual realty which, taken together, were ‘based’ on only a few hundred sq. ft of real estate, but nevertheless yielded a tidy annual income of Rs 100 crore, raises obvious questions about how the properties which have now suddenly vanished, suddenly came into being in the first place.

And from there it is but a step to the conclusion that it is unlikely that market forces will suddenly cease to operate when, after obtaining formal approval, the hoardings are back in business again.

As for the last obvious question that springs to mind, I must confess that though I was able to somehow squeak through with an M.A. in Economics, it was only 10 or 15 years after I had done so that it occurred to me that if you wish to recover an entry fee from people who are already in, you have to first find a way of getting them out.

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