High price of apartments in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) has been a significant deterrent to residential sales development in current years. High land rates due to the land locked nature of the city and the higher price of building premiums have ensured that apartment rates continued to stay higher regardless of the slowdown in sales in current years. Developers attempted to mitigate this by minimizing the size of the apartment in order to bring down the ticket size and make it more inexpensive. Consequently, compact properties began becoming pervasive in MMR.
Over a 5-year period amongst 2014 and 2019, the apartment size in new launches has lowered by 25% at the MMR level. Homebuyers gravitated towards such compact properties as it match inside their affordability metrics and offered the hectic pace of life in Mumbai, the time spent in the property had remained low.
The pandemic, even so, has challenged this notion. The lockdown has forced college/college and workplace activities to come inside the boundaries of the property, alongside typical household activities. Compact properties and the joint household culture in India have added chaos to this arrangement. This has created households come to recognize the want for more rooms in the property.
The lockdown has created study rooms, half bedrooms and balconies an critical element of the apartment, as they can be utilized for the objective of work from house or study from house. As per our analysis, developers have taken note of this trend and began reconfiguring new launches to have bigger rooms or more bedrooms. Adding a study area or a balcony does not add drastically to the final price of the apartment, but drastically improves the marketability of the apartment in the present circumstance.
If we refer to Table 1 beneath, the size of apartments in new launches post July had been bigger by 5% and 10% in the markets of Navi Mumbai and Peripheral Central Suburbs, respectively, as compared to these launched in 2019.
Average size of apartments in new launches
It is critical to note that the arranging of a project and designing of the layout of apartments is completed quite a few months prior to the project is formally launched. Hence, this trend is not really discernible now and is restricted to two markets. However, it is most likely to accelerate in the close to future across most markets in MMR.
(By Nibodh Shetty, Consultant – Research, Knight Frank India)