Bengaluru residential market outperforms other major cities

Also known as the country’s information technology (IT) capital, the southern city saw its unsold residential stock decline by 25% to 76,550 units at the end of the July-September quarter (2018) compared to 1,02,740 units in the corresponding quarter a year ago.

Pune and National Capital Region (NCR) witnessed 10% and 9% declines, respectively, in unsold inventory over the last year.

According to the report, Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) has the maximum number of 2,23,125 unsold housing units, surpassing even India’s largest housing market NCR, which has 1,90,650 unsold units.

“Burgeoning commercial activity, a cutting-edge start-up culture and realistic property prices dictated by end-user demand have kept Bengaluru’s real estate market vibrant, and generally more resilient than in other cities," Anuj Puri, chairman of Anarock Property, said.

The residential sector of Bengaluru complements its booming commercial office space market, which has attracted global investors and continues to see high demand despite the evidently challenging infrastructure issues.

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The city’s residential supply has continued to thrive owing to much-in-demand mid-segment housing in the ₹ 40-80 lakh range, something that Mumbai, for instance, is finding tough to achieve given the high land prices.

The share of affordable housing in Bengaluru’s residential supply, too, has risen dramatically in the last two years, increasing from 16% in 2016 to 25% in 2018.

“…In fact, Bengaluru’s housing sales increased by 26% in July-September over the same period last year, the highest amongst all cities. Overall unsold stock declined by 32% and stood at 76,550 units in Q3 2018 in contrast to 1,12,995 units in Q3 2015," Puri said.

While MMR and Hyderabad saw a marginal drop of 1-2 % in unsold inventory, Chennai and Kolkata actually saw an increase in unsold stock by 7% and 1%, respectively.