The Answer:
Unfortunately, the answer is not a simple  yes or a no, but a “it depends”.  It depends ofcourse, mainly on Why you want to purchase the property in the place?  Is it your first home, second home, it it purely an investment?  If it is an investment, is it short term, long term? etc.  What I was personally liked about the article is that it directly clarifies that there is much more to buying property than market dynamics.  Here’s an excerpt from the article that speaks more on this:

 An owned house is an asset that is passed down generations. Here, a home comes with a baggage of emotional attachment. It forms the firm roots in a city that people depend on. It is a huge asset to own in a city like Bangalore. 

    There is more to owning a home than just the financial gains over a period of time. Invariably, for many endusers, these gains remain notional as they rarely sell the house bought to live in. A home for them is a dream realised. No matter what the cost, it is a haven to come back to everyday. This is an investment that pays off every evening after a hard day’s work when you come back to its comforts. 

    As the city expands, everyday destinations such as the workplace, entertainment spots, shopping belts and social avenues spread out. New localities emerge and each one has its unique characteristics. Location therefore is a vital aspect of any property. Premium and sought-after locations are always few like corner sites in a layout. Therefore, a good location is not always available. If a location suits you well, it is never too early to pick up the option. 

 

My Personal View:
Regardless of what the media says, here’s my personal view on the matter.  If you are looking not for just any property, but a home; specially if it’s a first home or a second home where you plan to move into because of either convenience or because you’ve fallen in love with it.  If that’s the case then just follow your heart.  Ofcourse do check the fundamentals, ie see if the price is right, that it suits your budget, the legals are in order etc. etc.  But don’t worry too much about the market.  The ups and downs will continue regardless.  Bangalore has seen two booms and two slumps so far and there are many more to come.  These booms and slumps are for active investors and traders traders in property who want to make money on every deal they make.  Not for those who’re looking for a home to move into.  

However speaking of investors, I also still believe that there are good deals in todays market for those looking to invest in property.  If the fundamentals are strong (ie clear titles, area where growth is expected etc.) you cannot go wrong in the long run.

My views above are completely frank and unbiased. They would remain the same whether I would be in the real-estate business or not.

Fro the complete Times of India article title, Is this the right time to buy property, click here. 

Me and Ali are quite afficiandos of the life-changing GTD methodology.  What’s GTD?  GTD, stands for Getting Things Done.  It’s a system of best practices, founded by David Allen that anyone can adopt which enable one to:

- have laser sharp focus
- hence getting much more work done,
- in a stress free manner,
- thereby actually making making work much more fun.

I’ve personally experienced days when my productivity sores to 10 times the levels to that of days when I’m not practicing GTD.  And this figure of 10 times greater productivity is by actual Empirical measurement (comparing the tasks I got done post-GTD with those of pre-GTD) and not  just random figure.  Therefore we were really keen to imbibe the GTD methodology into Vakil Housing culture as much as possible.  Well it’s been two years running that we’ve been implementing GTD within our organisation with varying results.  Some took the GTD system like fish to water.   They caught the concept immediately and instantly began emptying their heads to various capture devices to experience the “mind like water”.  Others found it sufficient to implement just a couple of key concepts and rules.

It has been quite a journey for us to reach the level of GTD Implementation that we have at Vakil Housing.  At our peak group implementation, we had almost all senior managers:

- Clear the email inbox to “zero” every 2nd or 3rd day.

- Carry a paper based GTD Notebook with them everywhere

- Have their personal “only-swivel-distance-away” Reference Filing system.

- Have a clear understanding of Projects and Next Actions, 

- The always have a current list of Projects with them handy.

- Use the Natural Planning Model to do Project Planning 

Our implementation is still continuing and ongoing.  However the steps we have taken over a period of two years to the above stage have broadly been by doing the following:

- Conducting Weekly GTD Training Meetings for Department Heads
- Finding a working paper based GTD system and handing that out to everybody
- Conducting one-to-one GTD Training at the desks of various individuals
- Pairing people up as GTD Buddies to help each other do their daily process
- Making a personalised pocket notepad, to encourage all to capture commitments
- Putting up various GTD posters up in our conference room
- Personalised Jott system within the office to encourage capturing when one is not able to write.
- Finally being trained and creating trainers within the organisation to make this an on-going process.

We’ve learnt a lot over the last few years.  And we were thoroughly pleased when Me and Ali were requested to write about how we went about our implementing GTD at the official GTD Blog, GTD Times.  We’ve named the series, “Rolling Out GTD at Vakil Housing”.  We’ve completed three posts on the steps we’ve taken to roll out GTD across Vakil Housing, which are:

First Post: How we Successfully Implemented GTD across our Company thereby Increasing Productivity & Making Work Fun.

Second Post: A Cool GTD Gear to Motivate Everyone in your Organization to Collect & Have a Mind Like Water.

Third Post: The remaining GTD Tools I used to build my Corporate army of GTD Champions. 

We’ll have many more posts on this series, so stay tuned on GTD Times to catch them.

To learn more on how you personally can begin implementing GTD, click here to read our post on GTD for Beginners. 

Since the beginning of this year, we’ve been eagerly awaiting this training to take place and last week it finally happened. Dream Com True!  Through Linkage Incorporated, Leslie Boyer Harradine an associate with the David Allen Company, was down here for a whole week for an intensive training session, exclusively for Vakil Housing. Other than Training our staff in this methodology, Leslie, also trained a couple of us to be Trainers ourselves. So that this would not just be a one-time thing, but the practice and training will continue inhouse so that eventually a GTD culture sets-in.

Would like more information on what’s GTD? Well, GTD stands for Getting Things Done. It’s compiled by this genius of a guy, David Allen, who’s authored a book by the same name. Here’s a modified excerpt from my an earlier Blog Post of mine, that explains GTD in a bit more detail.

The Principle of GTD in a nutshell is that, your effectiveness is directly propotional to how relaxed you are. And how can anyone relax if there are 50 to 100 undone tasks (from unsent emails to incomplete reports to file) munching your mind to mush. Hence, the solution to get maximum effectiveness would be to have a system in place where anything…literally ANYTHING that comes to mind (be it via a task assigned to you by someone else or something that popped in your head regarding something that needs to be done), is instantly captured within 10 to 30 seconds in a system that you’re confident and absolutely and positively certain from which the same information can be retrieved at anytime within 10 to 30 seconds.

Therefore now imagine a scenario that you’re early at work, hoping to finish a report before everybody comes in. While you’re at the report, you get a call from home, you grudgingly temporarily put away the report to take the call, it’s your spouse online asking you to do/get something for her/him. As soon as you put the call down and before you can do anything about it, your boss comes in and asks you to step into his office for a n urgent meeting. Does this scenario sound familiar? Well,…instead of going numb of all these new tasks being fired at you and dealing with just the latest and loudest, you immediately record all these unfinished tasks ( i.e. your incomplete report, input from wife’s call & meeting notes from Boss) within 10 seconds from the moment it arrived in your life into a system; so that you can retrieve that info (within 10 seconds) when you are in the position to Get iT Done. And when you do that for every single thing in you mind….it would feel as if someone has lifted a mountain that you were carrying on your head for all these years and gently placed it aside.

I’ve listed further resources on GTD, on the same blog post that you can see by clicking here and scrolling down towards end of the post.

Oh well. This is just the beginning. To have this truly set-in to our culture will take time and a lot of work. Till then, let’s just enjoy at the photographs of the Training that took place, shall we?