Flat Sizes

The picture above shows the average flat size in different countries across the world.

Here’s what’s happening to flat sizes in India:

Property developers have cut down on the size of residential apartments by about a third in Mumbai and Delhi over the past five years in a bid to contain prices and push sales in a tepid market. However,while smaller apartments appear to have become the norm Mumbai and Delhi, there is  a varying rise in the median apartment sizes in other cities including Bangalore, Chennai, Pune, Hyderabad and Kolkata. In 2008, apartments in Greater Mumbai were about a fifth bigger than the national average of nearly 1,600 sq ft. While this number continues to remain more or less the same in most other cities, unit sizes in Mumbai have drastically reduced and are currently 15% lower than the national median size. Apartment sizes have also come down in Thane and Navi Mumbai, which are part of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region along with Mumbai, by 17% and 18% respectively. Apartment sizes in the National Capital Region have shrunk by 14% since 2008, while Pune has seen an increase of 23%. Developers may have launched projects with smaller-sized units during this period because of the meteoric rise in apartment prices during previous years. Residential property prices across the Mumbai Metropolitan Region rose as much as 110% in 2005-07. In Greater Mumbai alone, the figure was close to 120% on a simple average growth basis.