Though I would like to think of myself as a balanced investor with a judiciously diversified portfolio, the one investment that eluded me was real-estate. Not that I did not make an effort. I started looking around for a good plot / flat in Chennai in the early 2000s, but inspite of looking over various options, I never came around to actually buying anything. Colleagues who started the search with me then, today own 2-3 homes at a minimum.
And it was sometime mid-2012 that I decided to lock-in to the 9.5cents plot (with an old home on it) adjacent to our home in Kerala. This plot has been for sale for years, but never got any buyer for 2 reasons. The seller always wanted ridiculously more than what the going rate was. And more importantly, the L-shaped plot (wider part at the rear and narrow part on the road-side) had a temple adjacent to it, which kept buyers of all religions away.
Understandably, the Muslims and Christians kept away because they would not want to have a temple in front of their home. But what surprised me was that even the Hindus kept away. Primarily because they felt that they might incur the wrath of the diety (Bhima of Pandava fame) if they cooked non-veg in the vicinity of his abode. Which is funny because I don't think Bhima was a vegetarian anyway. And more importantly, in Kerala since the Hindus usually cremate their deceased in their plot itself, there was the fear of how the deity would take to this defiling of his surroundings.
Anyway, our current home has been sharing a wall with the temple for as long as I can remember and we have no issues with that. So there was nothing stopping us from buying the plot. More importantly, if someone did overcome their fears and ended up buying the property, they would demolish the existing home and the new one would be built too close to our home for comfort.
Unlike Chennai were homes share walls, we in Kerala are used to living in big plots without having nosey neighbours too close. Our home stands on around an acre of land with our neighbours also having their homes on similar large plots. So for that strategic reason alone, the plot was worth it. And after some hectic bargaining and encashing many FDs, I finally became the owner of a plot of land on 20th September 2012.
Some snaps of how the plot and the home on it looked like when we bought it. Snaps taken from the terrace of our home. Please note that the home was built sometime in 1962, with one room at the front having a concrete roof (a big deal in those times) and the rest of the home having tiles on the roof.
You can see the roof of the temple in the snap below at bottom-left corner. The whole place was overrun with shrubs/weeds, which we cleared and the resulting space was promptly taken over by Sheena for starting a kitchen garden - more on that in another post.
The front view of the home, as seen from the road.
Another frontal snap in which to the right you can see part of the temple.
The roof being renovated completely. A key thing in Kerala where it rains round the year.
The initial thought was to demolish the old home, but then we thought it better to give it a new lease of life by doing a complete renovation, which in hindsight turned out to be a big task, both in terms of effort and cost. We started with repairing the leaky roof - changed all the rotten wood on the roof and false-ceiling, replaced the broken tiles, patched up the chipped away concrete, had new doors and windows made by a carpenter, built a wall linking our home and the new plot and cordoning off the temple (Bhima got a compound wall free). And finally applied a few coats of paint (awesome color selection by Sheena). Anyway, the end-result was totally worth the money spent.
Front-view as it looks today.
Another view of the front, with the temple also in the picture.
A view of the home as seen from our backyard.
So, 4-months after buying it and spending 2lakhs+ on renovation, I now have real-estate also in my portfolio, though quite late in the day. Atleast better late than never.
