Budget 2024, July 24 -- In the Union Budget 2024 tabled in the Lok Sabha on Tuesday, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman proposed some amendments to the income tax laws, which will have far-reaching implications for real estate transactions. Let us discuss them.

Your investment in real estate becomes long-term after you have held the same for more than 24 months. To compute long-term capital gains on the sale of any immovable property held for more than 24 months, you were allowed to enhance your cost of acquisition of the property by applying the cost inflation index (CII) until now- this effectively reduced the taxable long-term capital gains.

Let us understand this with an example. If you had bought a plot of land in January 2015 for...