While the successful builders and real estate developers are basking under their continued success in the hot Kochi real estate market, the Americans have a different story to tell. The vast virgin lands afforded great potential for experimentation in various forms of housing development. Liberty and free enterprise in the USA allowed for the rapid growth of cooperative housing. However, it has been the condominiums, which have overshadowed the cooperative movement. Although a recent innovation, it has evolved into a major housing sub-system in the USA.

The condominium can best be defined as a form of ownership of real property that combines an undivided interest, held in common with others, in land and certain portions of a building or buildings on the one hand, with a separate and individual interest in a specific part of a building on the other. In the condominiums, it is the real estate developer who controls and steers the project. Title insurers, mortgage bankers, public agencies and buyers are the actors who have a vital role to play. The condominium movement had, by and large, been a movement vigorously pursued by capitalistic real estate developers and investors. However, its inherent advantages had won it statutory recognition. The role of the private housing developers in the whole process, along with the nature of housing finance system was two major determinants of this sector. Consider the present developments in Kochi. In the city of Kochi Apartments are offered at high prices, and condominiums are thus making a slow entry.

Although cooperative housing has a long history in the UK, it was only since the 1974 Housing Finance Act that a phenomenal growth in this sector was experienced. It was Britain and the Rockdale Pioneers who were considered the founders of the worldwide consumer cooperative movement in the 1840’s. One of their aims was the building, purchasing or erecting of a number of houses in which those members desiring to assist each other in improving their domestic and social conditions may reside at arms length.