Homes under ₹40 lakh fall to 6 per cent of launches, from half in 2018

Affordable homes priced below ₹40 lakh made up just 6 per cent of new launches across India's top seven cities in the June quarter, against roughly 52 per cent of supply in 2018, according to ANAROCK data highlighted in an industry analysis this week. New supply is now concentrated in the ₹80 lakh to ₹2.5 crore brackets, with the mid segment holding about 19 per cent.

The analysis argues this is a viability problem more than a demand problem. In large metros, land can absorb 60 to 63 per cent of project cost, and because banks cannot fund land acquisition, developers borrow at 18 to 20 per cent during that stage — economics that make a sub-₹40-lakh home hard to deliver profitably.

The squeeze is sharpest in MMR, where the price-to-income ratio is put at 14.3, the highest among Indian metros, and EMI burdens for budget buyers are estimated to have climbed from about 43 per cent of income toward 60 per cent in recent years. PMAY-Urban's allocation rose 179 per cent to ₹22,025 crore this fiscal, but researchers flag persistent underspending, and a NITI Aayog committee pegs the urban housing shortage at around 2 crore units.

For Maharashtra, the implication is that new supply will keep drifting to the periphery unless policy shifts — revisiting affordability definitions for metro markets, densifying transit corridors and unlocking public land — change the arithmetic of building small.