Housing.com along with Indian School of Business (ISB) launched its Housing Pricing Index (HPI), an indicator of economic activity in real-estate, the second-largest employment generating sector in India after agriculture. Launched during a virtual meet attended by Union Housing & Urban Affairs Secretary, Durga Shanker Mishra and several industry heads and academicians, the HPI will provide monthly reports on price and quantity movement in various property markets across the country.1

By offering useful insights into price movement, the index could help a potential homebuyer assess the appropriate time to buy a property and at the same time assist sellers in knowing the most opportune moment to sell their assets. Policymakers and financial analysts can also use it as a reliable estimate to keep track of the trends in the sector.

Based on a survey of cities such as Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Delhi NCR (Faridabad, Ghaziabad, Gurugram, Greater Noida and Noida), Hyderabad, Kolkata, Mumbai and Pune from 2017 to the present, conducted every quarter, the Elara Technologies-owned company's HPI uses granular prices from localities and their corresponding weights based on transaction value share of that locality in India, basing its findings on 1, 2, and 3-BHK apartments. Data collected for this purpose include information on price per square foot, quantity, and the total value of transactions in the previous three months for various sub-localities within each city. It also includes other details such as the number of bedrooms, construction status, and the number of inventory units.2

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• 1. According to the Gurugram-based digital real estate company, the HPI, created in association with ISB's Srini Raju Centre for IT and the Networked Economy (SRITNE), aims to serve as a tool that tracks changes in residential home prices across India's eight major markets.
• 2. Mishra said: “The HPI has the potential to emerge as a good indicator of the country’s real-estate market health. The real-estate sector has been impacted due to the pandemic slowdown and overall uncertainty. At this time, it is essential to track the growth via credible sources that will help authorities make quicker and informed decisions during such exogenous shocks. We have observed that the demand has already picked up in Q1 2021 and the sector has started to show signs of recovery. I commend and encourage the two institutions for collaborating towards this initiative to monitor the movement of housing prices and quantities in a fast-growing economy like ours. Buyers as well as policymakers are mostly forced to rely on market anecdotes and guesswork about property price movements in Indian cities in the absence of quality high-frequency data, especially locality specific data. The entire idea behind the launch of the Housing HPI is to address this issue. Aside from benefitting buyers, investors and policymakers, data from our HPI will also be immensely valuable for real estate developers who are considering a new locality to launch new developments. For real estate builders, having access to information such as this has become more crucial than ever now, with the demand landscape rapidly evolving due to the emergence of the “work-from-home” concept in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Dhruv Agarwala, group CEO, Housing.com, Makaan.com and PropTiger.com.