With home buyers in Mumbai having to shell out over $1 million (about ₹72 crore) for a 106 sq m apartment, the city features on the world’s most expensive cities list, according to Knight Frank Wealth Report 2021.
For reference, in Monaco which continued to reign as the world’s most expensive city, a million dollars will fetch about 15 sq meters of built up space, in Hong Kong 23 sq meters, London 31 sq meters, New York 34 sq meters and Geneva 35 sq meters.
In Mumbai, for the same price in 2019, a buyer would have gotten 102 sq meters or 1,100 square feet. The other Indian cities in the list are New Delhi, where $1 million will get buyers nearly twice as much 202 sq meters or 2,174 sq feet (last year 197 sq meters or 2,120 sq feet) and in Bengaluru, thrice as much 351 sq meters or 3,778 sq feet (336 sq meters or 3,617 sq feet ). Shishir Baijal, Chairman & Managing Director, Knight Frank India, said, “2020 has been a year that saw Covid-19 influenced slowdown not only in the real estate industry but overall, in the economy. The policy decisions by the Maharashtra and Karnataka Governments to reduce the stamp duty have acted as a counterbalance to the disruption caused by the pandemic. The luxury residential sales saw an exponential surge in Mumbai in Q4 2020 and the demand outlook for 2021 remains resilient. The current market price offers a premium value to make a luxury residential asset purchase in Indian cities for both domestic and global wealthy individuals.”
Luxury house prices
According to Knight Frank’s Prime International Residential Index (PIRI 100), the global prime residential pricing has registered an increase of 1.9 per cent year-on-year (Y-o-Y).
Luxury housing markets performed better than expected in 2020, with 66 of the 100 markets featured in PIRI recording annual price growth of 2 per cent. PIRI 100 tracks the movements in luxury residential prices across the world’s top residential markets. Globally, Delhi ranked 72nd in terms of luxury residential prices which remained marginally lower at minus 0.1 per cent YoY in 2020. Mumbai (77th) and Bengaluru (79th) registered a decline of 1.5 per cent and 2.0 per cent YoY respectively.