Mumbai: The increased emphasis on work-from-home and study-from-home culture during the Covid pandemic has contributed to average flat sizes in seven major cities across the country increasing by seven per cent in the past five years, a report published by a real estate services firm has shown. However, Mumbai, known as among the costliest real estate markets in the world, stands as an outlier.
According to a report by ANAROCK Property Consultants, the contents of which were made public this week, the Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR) — the urban agglomeration of Mumbai — is the only city where the average flat sizes have shrunk over a five-year period, starting from the pre-pandemic year of 2018. The average size of a flat in MMR dropped to 743 square feet in 2023 according to data from the first quarter of the year, as compared to an average of 932 square feet in 2018.
For the study, the real estate consultant has compared data from the first three months of 2023 with the annual average for 2018, 2019, 2020,2021 and 2022.
“In MMR, affordability is constantly compromised. The city’s yardstick of affordability is unique in the sense that middle-class buyers find property prices of most properties considered as mid-range for the reason as unaffordable. The only ways developers can make their offerings more attainable to a larger segment of buyers are to either compromise on the location or reduce sizes,” Anuj Puri, chairman, ANAROCK Group, said in a statement.
According to data from ANAROCK, the average flat sizes in the seven cities — the National Capital Region (Delhi-NCR), MMR, Hyderabad, Chennai, Bengaluru, Kolkata and Pune — rose to 1,225 square feet in 2023 as of data from the first quarter, as compared to 1,150 square feet in 2018.
Puri added: “Before the Covid-19 pandemic, apartment sizes were shrinking annually to meet the demand for compact homes prevalent then. The central concerns were affordability and millennials’ preference for low-maintenance homes.”
“2020 saw an abrupt reversal of buyer preferences. With a sudden emphasis on the WFH (work-from-home) and study-from-home culture, flat sizes began increasing for the first time in four years,” he said further.
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Mumbai’s average flat size smallest among 7 cities
According to the ANAROCK report, the NCR saw the biggest jump in average flat size during the period — from about 1,250 square feet in 2018 to about 1,700 square feet in the first quarter of 2023.
The report further says that Hyderabad has the most spacious flats on an average, at 2,200 square feet, followed by NCR at 1,700 square feet, according to data from the first quarter of 2023.
Bengaluru has an average flat size of 1,300 square feet, followed by Chennai at 1,175 square feet and Kolkata at 1,150 square feet. Pune and MMR have the lowest flat sizes among the seven cities, with the average flat size in Pune being 1,013 square feet, while that in MMR being much smaller, at 743 square feet.
The flat sizes in MMR have consistently decreased every year since 2018, said the report, except for in 2020, when the average flat sizes in MMR saw an annual rise of 21 per cent, as compared with data from 2019. However, there has been a steady decline since then with flat sizes having shrunk by 5 per cent in the last year itself — from 783 square feet in the first quarter of 2022 to 743 square feet in the first quarter of 2023.
“With WFH having become less of a factor after the worst of the Covid-19 pandemic and more people returning to the office, developers in MMR are seeing to re-include the inherent demand for well-located, smaller-sized flats in their repertoire,” Puri said.
(Edited by Poulomi Banerjee)
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