Until 6.1.x the property which decided that the velocity templates will be reloaded each time the page is visited was – velocity.engine.resource.manager.cache.enabled=false . From Liferay 6.2 onwards this property has changed to : velocity.engine.resource.modification.check.interval=0 (0 means each time it will reload the template, -1 would mean cache it ones and keep it indefinitely and > 1 for .e.g. 60 would mean, cache the template for 60 milliseconds). In development mode, keeping velocity.engine.resource.modification.check.interval=0
is extremely important for themes to reflect changes you do in .vm files and see the effect of your change without redeploying the theme. By the way, I am using JRebel and it did not work with themes because of the above property.

Once I made velocity.engine.resource.modification.check.interval=0
(default was 60) I could see the changes immediately after making changes