Real Estate Guide for Salaried India: What You Can Afford

Editor’s Analysis — the four things first-time buyers get wrong

There are four things a salaried first-time buyer gets wrong almost every time, and they compound in that order. First, tax on the purchase itself. An under-construction flat carries GST at 5 per cent without input tax credit, or 1 per cent for qualifying affordable housing; a property with a completion certificate carries none. On a Rs 80 lakh under-construction purchase that is Rs 4 lakh that never appears on the price banner, and buyers routinely budget as though the quoted price is the price.

Second, and this is the expensive one, the EMI-to-income ratio. My own rule is that the EMI should not exceed 25 per cent of monthly income. Buyers routinely take 50 to 60 per cent, and they do it because the bank approved it — lenders will typically stretch the fixed-obligation-to-income ratio to 50 to 55 per cent for a salaried borrower, and higher above Rs 1 lakh of monthly income. What the bank is testing is whether you can service the loan. It is not testing whether you can also save, invest, absorb a salary cut or change jobs. Those are your problem, and at 55 per cent they become impossible.

Third, the 25 per cent has to be a full housing cost, not just the EMI. Property tax, society maintenance, the shifting, the interiors, the appliances — from what I see on the developer side, a fit-out on an unfurnished flat routinely runs 8 to 12 per cent of the purchase price, and it is almost never budgeted. If all of that has to fit inside 25 per cent, the honest answer for many buyers is that they should be buying a smaller flat.

Fourth, and only fourth, the prepayment arithmetic. One extra EMI a year does shorten a 20-year loan meaningfully, and it is worth doing. But buyers reach for that lever as though it fixes the structure of the decision, when it is a second-order optimisation on top of a first-order mistake. Get the ratio right at purchase and the prepayment is a bonus. Get it wrong and no amount of prepaying rescues it.

Editor’s Analysis — you are buying a product, not a property

Here is something buyers do not generally realise: the industry knows more about their behaviour than they know about it themselves, and it spends real money to keep it that way. Developers subscribe to project-level data platforms — PropEquity tracks over 65,000 projects from 16,000 developers across more than 40 cities, Liases Foras tracks around 20,000 projects every quarter, ANAROCK publishes city-level absorption and unsold inventory — and that is before the marketing layer, which is now almost entirely digital and gives near-real-time visibility into which configuration, which price band and which micro-market a given profile of buyer is actually searching for. When a buyer walks into a site office believing they are making a private decision, they are walking into a conversation that has already been modelled.

The consequence is that a flat has stopped being treated as real estate and started being treated as a product with a target customer. That is not a criticism; it is simply what the industry now does. You can read it off the market. DLF’s Privana North in Gurugram booked around Rs 11,000 crore of sales as an explicitly super-luxury proposition. Lodha built its scale on township-format products like Palava aimed at a completely different buyer. Godrej Properties runs an asset-light, pan-India model that lets it position differently city by city — and it closed FY26 as India’s largest residential developer by booking value at Rs 34,171 crore, its third consecutive year in that position. On trade reporting of Mumbai’s first half of 2026, the 2,000 to 4,000 sqft band accounted for about 58 per cent of primary luxury sales, and roughly 19 per cent of luxury buyers there were upgrading from outside the traditional South Mumbai catchment — that is an aspirational buyer being deliberately catered to, not a coincidence.

What this means practically for a buyer is simple. Every element of the offering you are being shown — the carpet area, the amenity mix, the payment plan, the launch price — has been chosen for a customer profile. The useful question at a site visit is not “is this a good project”. It is “who was this built for, and am I that person”. If you are not, you will pay for features you will never use, and you will find the resale market narrower than you expected.

Editor’s Analysis — diligence the micro-market, not just the developer

If I were buying today as a salaried professional, the thing I would do differently from the standard advice is this: I would spend as much time diligencing the micro-market as diligencing the developer. The standard advice stops at “buy from a reputed builder”, and that is necessary but nowhere near sufficient. In practice, pricing, amenity quality and the state of civic infrastructure can differ meaningfully across a hundred-metre gap — one side of a road inside a municipal limit with a piped water connection, the other side under a development authority still waiting for its trunk infrastructure.

Mahalunge in Pune is the example I would point anyone to. It was sold on the strength of promised infrastructure, and a good deal of that promise is still pending. Residents there have been dependent on tanker water despite paying property tax, and have escalated to the Deputy Chief Minister’s office over water supply and the state of the link road to the Hinjewadi IT park — incomplete bridge work, potholes, poor lighting. The Pune Municipal Corporation and the PMRDA have each pointed at the other, with PMRDA having granted builder permissions on the condition that developers arrange water supply themselves. The remaining Mahalunge-Man Town Planning Scheme works, including the water distribution network, sewerage, storm water and the treatment plants, are still being executed. Nothing about that reflects on the quality of the buildings. It reflects entirely on which authority the plot happens to fall under and how far its infrastructure programme has actually got.

So the discipline I would apply is to price the gap between what has been promised and what is currently operational, and to be honest that the gap is the risk I am buying. Two concrete tests before signing: check whether the plot is inside the municipal corporation limit or under the development authority, and ask specifically who is legally responsible for water, sewerage and roads on the day of possession. And then ask the harder question — is the price I am paying justified by the amenities and civic infrastructure that exist today, not by the ones on the brochure. If the answer only works on the promised version, the premium is being paid twice: once to the developer, and again in tanker bills.