Pricing index for housing launched to help homebuyers make informed purchase decisions.

On May 31, 2021, online real estate portal Housing.com and the global business school Indian School of Business (ISB) announced the launch of their Housing Pricing Index (HPI), which will assist potential homebuyers in determining the best time to buy a property and sellers in determining the best time to sell their assets.

Homebuyers, investors, real estate developers, and policymakers will be able to track high-frequency price movement in India’s important residential markets thanks to the HPI’s collaboration with industry body NAREDCO.

Union Housing and Urban Affairs Secretary Durga Shanker Mishra hosted a virtual event to unveil the Housing.com-ISB Housing Pricing Index (HPI).

“The Housing Price Index, developed in collaboration with the Indian School of Business and Housing.com, has the potential to become a great indicator of the country’s real-estate market health. The COVID-led downturn and general uncertainty have had an impact on the real estate sector. At this moment, it is critical to track growth through reputable sources, which would allow authorities to make faster and more informed decisions during such exogenous shocks,” added Mishra.

In asking that Housing.com and the ISB strengthen the index, Mishra said the index would be helpful to home purchasers and policymakers to decide what to do in future.

According to Mishra, the Housing Bank (NHB) maintains its own housing price index.

The HPI was developed in collaboration with the Indian School of Business’s (ISB) Srini Raju Centre for IT and the Networked Economy (SRITNE) to serve as a tool for tracking changes in residential house values across India’s eight major markets.

The index, by providing beneficial insights into price fluctuation, could assist a potential buyer in determining the best time to acquire a property, as well as sellers in determining the best time to sell their assets. Policymakers and financial analysts can also use it as a trustworthy estimate to track sector changes.

The Elara Technologies owned HPI uses granular prices from the localities and their corresponding weights based on the transaction value share from that locality in India, the Basin, based on surveys of cities such as Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi NCR (Faridabad, Ghaziabad, Gurugram, Greater Noida and Noida), Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai and Pune from 2017 up to the present every quarter of the year,

Data gathered for this purpose include price per square foot, quantity, and the total value of transactions in the past three months for various sub-localities within each city. It also provides information such as the number of bedrooms, the progress of development, and the number of inventory units.

“In the absence of reliable high-frequency data, particularly locality specific data, buyers and policymakers are mainly obliged to rely on market anecdotes and guesswork regarding property price changes in Indian cities. The entire purpose of launching the Housing HPI is to address this issue. Aside from buyers, investors, and policymakers, data from our HPI will be extremely useful for real estate developers looking for a new location to launch new projects,” said Dhruv Agarwala, Group CEO of Housing.com, Makaan.com, and PropTiger.com.

According to Rajendra Srivastava, Dean ISB, this index will assist industry and government decision-makers by giving relevant information on the real estate market and designing appropriate action and interventions.

Niranjan Hiranandani, NAREDCO’s national president and founder and MD of the Hiranandani Group, stated that the Index will address the issue of a lack of well-defined data by providing companies with the necessary business intelligence, market insights, trends, and sentiments to make well-informed decisions.

“Policymakers and decision-makers in the public and private sectors require accurate and timely information on economic activity in order to take effective action and interventions. At the moment, such information has low granularity and resolution, and it is frequently fragmented and privately held, making coordination among economic actors problematic. In the face of current systematic and pervasive disruptions in the economy, particularly the COVID-19 pandemic, indices like the HPI would be extremely important to industry and policymakers,” said Deepa Mani of ISB.