Category business

– by Akash Pharande, managing Director – Pharande Spaces

Property prices increase even though buildings age. How come? In the case of most other manufactured products other than gold ornaments, prices decrease as the product ages, don’t they?

Most people prefer to buy new homes rather than used properties because older properties need more maintenance and repair and because new projects have better amenities and facilities. A TV, car or mobile phone rapidly lose value every month because of wear and tear, and newer models are constantly being churned out.

But while older properties do lose resale value to some extent, they retain much of their inherent value no matter how old they get – and, if one waits long enough, eventually become more valuable than before.

Properties in older buildings in one area cost more than properties in another, much newer buildings. How does this happen?

It’s a good question, and every existing or aspiring homebuyer should understand the dynamics involved. To get a grip on it, let’s return to the above example of gold ornaments. There are two primary factors involved:

The inherent value of the basic material: Gold is a precious metal whose value appreciates because of scarcity because there are finite gold reserves on the planet

The manufacturer’s brand: A gold ornament made by a famous jewellery brand is worth more than an ornament with the same amount of gold by an unknown manufacturer. This is because the well-known brand has invested much more in timeless design and quality workmanship. Therefore, it stands the test of time and commands more desirability.

What does this have to do with housing?

The inherent value of the basic material: In rapidly developing or fully-developed urban areas, available land is limited and gets costlier over time. Every apartment owner has a share of the land on which the project is built.

The constantly decreasing supply of land pushes up property prices, even if the buildings themselves are aging. Location plays a huge role because some areas provide a better lifestyle than others.

The manufacturer’s brand: As in the case of jewellery, the brand of a real estate developer matters. Today, most homebuyers prefer to buy properties by reputed developers, and not only because they know that their under-construction homes will be delivered on time. Branded players invest more into both the quality and location of their projects and also in the scope and quality of project maintenance. For this reason, their projects also see much more rental demand.

Don’t aging building depreciate?

Even with the most careful use, gold ornaments get tarnished over time. Decades after they were first made, they will have lost much of their sheen. Nevertheless, the base material – gold – not only retains its value but becomes even more valuable.

Old ornaments can be melted down to make new ones with a brand-new sheen. No value is lost in the process, and the ‘making charges’ are already recouped because gold has already become scarcer.

The cement, steel and other materials used in modern buildings – even those by branded builders – degrade over the decades. However, the basic input – land – appreciates, and every property owner’s share of the project’s land becomes more valuable. In high-quality such as integrated townships and gated communities, the developer has locked in the appreciating power of not only land but location, as well as reserved green open areas and amenity spaces that add further value over and above the base value of every apartment owner’s share of the plot.

Old buildings are demolished after 50-60 years, and new ones with superior amenities are built. At this point, the original property owners are in the driver’s seat, and their new properties are invariably bigger, better and more valuable than the first ones.

Macro factors

– Supply and Demand: The demand for property is influenced by population growth, economic conditions, and the desirability of the location. If the demand for property in a particular area outweighs the available supply, prices will rise, irrespective of the age of the buildings.

– Inflation: Property prices are influenced by overall inflation, which erodes currency’s purchasing power and causes products with in-built value to appreciate over time. Here again, gold and real estate share very similar attributes.

Final thoughts

All of the above revolves around monetary value, but an owned property is valuable in many other respects. You pay no rent on it, and it gives you a lifetime of safety and convenience – or income if it is rented out. Moreover, there is ‘social value’ to consider.

Property owners and tenants hardly share the same social status, nor do tenants have as many legal rights than owners when it comes to using the property. And finally, tenants have no share in the value of the property they occupy.

Interestingly, the age-old ‘buy or rent’ debate was finally put to rest during the Covid-19 pandemic – ‘buy’ has emerged as the way to go. Why did it take a global health cataclysm to cause even life-long renters to come to the market as property buyers? There are plenty of theories, but all the reasons are a combination of human psychology and fiscal prudence.

We like to own what we use, and we like to see our investments grow. And housing prices zooming anywhere between 5-15% in just the last two years, the investment sense behind owning residential real estate is far beyond dispute.

Three-day program focuses on effective leadership behaviors and successful business performance.

(St. Louis, Mo., June 7, 2023) Psychological Associates (PA), a consulting company that improves business performance through its leadership and talent development services, will hold its Q4 Leadership: The People Skills Advantage™ program. The three-day intensive workshop will take place Tues., Aug. 8 through Thurs., Aug. 10 from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. The program will be held at the Charles F. Knight Executive Education & Conference Center located at One Brookings Dr. on the campus of Washington University in St. Louis.

The program’s individualized experience focuses on helping a company’s top talent improve team success through the people skills they need to engage and influence others. Q4 Leadership comprehensively identifies and adapts effective leadership behaviors with more intricate job-related feedback. The program combines the latest in instructional design along with PA’s six decades of pragmatic leadership development.

The workshop – which uses real-world issues and situations – is designed for C-level leaders, vice presidents, and general managers who will improve their interpersonal skills to break down silos and contribute to synergistic teams.

Psychological Associates’ facilitator Marianne Whelchel will lead the sessions. She brings more than 16 years of global leadership development, training, and human resources experience to the workshop. Whelchel has managed the design and delivery of leadership curriculum for over 6,000 leaders globally.

Psychological Associates helps clients select, develop, and retain their best leaders, enabling them to build exceptional organizations. Its exclusive Q4 Dimensional® Model of Behavior™ – an industry-renowned structure that categorizes observable actions into understandable groupings – inspires high performance while attaining comprehensive results. Consulting capabilities include talent assessment, leadership development, succession planning, people analytics, and executive coaching. Founded in 1958, Psychological Associates is headquartered at 8000 Maryland Ave. in Clayton, Mo. Reservations are required since space is limited. For more information, call (314) 725-7771 or visit www.q4solutions.com.

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Bengaluru, India, 06th, June 2023 – Verizon Business today released the results of its 16th annual Data Breach Investigations Report (2023 DBIR), which analyzed 16,312 security incidents and 5,199 breaches. Chief among its findings is the soaring cost of ransomware – malicious software (malware) that encrypts an organization’s data and then extorts large sums of money to restore access.

The median cost per ransomware incident doubled over the past two years, with 95% of ransomware incidents that experienced a loss costing between $1 million and $2.25 million. This rise in cost coincides with a dramatic rise in frequency. Last year, the number of ransomware attacks was greater than the previous five years combined. That prevalence held steady this year: Representing almost a quarter of all breaches (24%), ransomware remains one of the top cyberattack methods.

The human element still makes up the overwhelming majority of incidents, and is a factor in 74% of total breaches, even as enterprises continue to safeguard critical infrastructure and increase training on cybersecurity protocols. One of the most common ways to exploit human nature is social engineering, which refers to manipulating an organization’s sensitive information through tactics like phishing, in which a hacker convinces the user into clicking on a malicious link or attachment.

“Senior leadership represents a growing cybersecurity threat for many organizations,” said Chris Novak, Managing Director of Cybersecurity Consulting at Verizon Business. “Not only do they possess an organization’s most sensitive information, they are often among the least protected, as many organizations make security protocol exceptions for them. With the growth and increasing sophistication of social engineering, organizations must enhance the protection of their senior leadership now to avoid expensive system intrusions.”

Like ransomware, social engineering is a lucrative tactic for cybercriminals, especially given the rise of those techniques being used to impersonate enterprise employees for financial gain, an attack known as Business Email Compromise (BEC). The median amount stolen in BECs has increased over the last couple of years to $50,000 USD, based on Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) data, which might have contributed to pretexting nearly doubling this past year. With the growth of BEC, enterprises with distributed workforces face a challenge that takes on greater importance: creating and strictly enforcing human-centric security best practices.

“Globally, cyber threat actors continue their relentless efforts to acquire sensitive consumer and business data. The revenue generated from that information is staggering, and it’s not lost on business leaders, as it is front and center at the board level,” said Craig Robinson, Research Vice President at IDC. “Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report provides deep insights into the topics that are critical to the cybersecurity industry and has become a source of truth for the business community.”

In addition to the increase in social engineering, other key findings in the 2023 DBIR include:

While espionage garners substantial media attention, owing to the current geopolitical climate, only 3% of threat actors were motivated by espionage. The other 97% were motivated by financial gain.
32% of yearly Log4j vulnerability scanning occurred in the first 30 days after its release, demonstrating threat actors’ velocity when escalating from a proof of concept to mass exploitation.
External actors leveraged a variety of different techniques to gain entry to an organization, such as using stolen credentials (49%), phishing (12%) and exploiting vulnerabilities (5%).

One of the ways that enterprises can help safeguard their critical infrastructure is through the adoption and adherence of industry-leading protocols and practices. Verizon recently became the first nationwide telecom provider to become a participant of Mutually Agreed Norms for Routing Security (MANRS): a global initiative that provides crucial fixes to reduce the most common routing threats that can be exploited by attackers. Participation in MANRS demonstrates Verizon’s commitment to implementing industry-best fixes to common routing threats and best practices geared at helping to prevent cyber incidents for customers on the network.

Mumbai, 07th June 2023: Internovo Ventures, a joint venture between the family office of financial services veteran Karan Desai and Novostack, a new-age technology company has launched Indirow, a state-of-the-art B2B2C loan origination platform. Live on Google Playstore and soon-to-be available on Apple app store and in web version, Indirow aims to meet the growing demand for various retail loan products in India with its diverse product offerings. This unique platform also offers opportunities to businesses to become partners and monetise their client base and develop new revenue streams.

Indirow offers a broad range of credit solutions such as personal loan, home loan, business loan, loan against property, and gold loans, to name a few. Indirow aims to emerge as the most sought after digital credit solutions platform with strong product diversity and personalized services. For that, Internovo Ventures has entered into a strategic partnership with RULoans, one of India’s leading lending services businesses, which distributes over Rs.3,000 crore of retail loans to over 200 banks and NBFCs across India every month.

Indirow provides curated financing solutions to customers by leveraging an integrated credit assessment system with a leading credit bureau agency. The system helps Indirow evaluate the customer credit profile and prescribe suitable solutions and financiers. Customers will truly experience a seamless digital borrowing journey with end-to-end assistance and a fast and user-friendly interface for tracking each phase of the journey. Unlike broker-driven small-scale loan arrangement marketplaces, the platform does not charge its customers for its services.

Apart from offering credit solutions to end-customers, this loan origination platform caters to small to midsize businesses that are into providing non-lending related services to a large captive pool of customers. By becoming Indirow partners, these businesses can offer credit solutions to their captive clientele via dedicated links, API integration and co-branded arrangements through the platform.

Commenting on the launch of Indirow, Karan Desai, Co-Founder at Internovo Ventures, said, “With Indirow, we aim to disrupt the conventional digital borrowing and lending model and present a futuristic, transparent, responsive and efficient borrowing and loan origination platform which safeguards its customer interest as well as helps businesses monetise their client base. User-friendly on-boarding is at the core of a strong customer relationship and we have made it possible through our strategic technology stacks and network collaborations.” Akshay Srivastava who is also a Co-Founder and leads technology added, “Putting the customers first, we have introduced initiatives like customer-led scrubbing of consumer data on the credit bureau so that credit score remains unaffected and customers are able to borrow right. We are working towards making Indirow a robust, differentiated and trusted customer acquisition platform to businesses. Our initial goal is to disburse over Rs.100 crore through Indirow in FY24.”

Indirow comes with a strong tech-enabled back-end capable of efficiently managing customer acquisition, onboarding, and borrowing journeys with minimal manual intervention. Thus, the customer acquisition-to-loan disbursement process on the platform doesn’t require operational interventions from partners. Using the Indirow mobile app or website, the partners can view real-time dashboards to track the loan processing status of their customers.

Kolkata,7th June 2023– Top-notch MFI 1 graded, Arohan Financial Services has won recognitions in the categories of “Innovation in Lending” for ArohanPrivilege – a first-in-the industry digital lending platform for microfinance customers, “Lending Solutions” for Nirnay – an industry leading credit scoring system and “Financial Inclusion Programme” for ApnaArohan at the SKOCH Fintech Awards, 2023. recently.

Arohan’s industry-first credit scoring system ‘Nirnay’ stands out with its advanced algorithms and holistic evaluation, considering various factors beyond traditional credit metrics.

ApnaArohan Customer App is a 3600 mobile app for the millions of customers that Arohan caters to. Equipped with regional language capabilities, the app allows customers to get information on their existing loans, including eligibility checks for future loans, and information about various cross-sale products, including insurance and even allows customers to pay their EMIs online directly through the app. As an industry-first initiative, the app facilitates for a select group of customers – ArohanPrivilege, the facility of getting a loan within 10 minutes after a successful loan application on the mobile app.

Mr. Manoj Nambiar, Managing Director, Arohan Financial Services Limited, said “Arohan’s prudent investment in building a state-of-the-art technology landscape is a testimony of the Company’s commitment to transparency, robust operational processes, scalability, and sustainability. We are focused on our Vision of impacting 20 million lives by the year 2027.”

Such milestone technology innovations set the platform for a paradigm shift in the ethos of the microfinance industry in the country. Arohan has also been conferred the top-notch MFI 1 grading, the seventh year in a row, by CARE Advisory Research and Training Limited (CareEdge Advisory) after a comprehensive evaluation conducted in April 2023. The MFI 1 grade is assigned on an 8-point scale and signifies the “Highest capacity to manage microfinance operations in a sustainable manner”.

As Arohan Financial Services Limited continues to receive industry recognition and expand its reach, it remains steadfast in its commitment to providing inclusive financial services, driving one of the key national priorities of financial inclusion.