How many luxury condos?

For most builders, that’s the most important question these days — how many luxury condominiums should they build? Brokerage house SSKI attempts to answer that after looking at the results of the NCAER’s income projections till the end of the decade and marrying that with the average size of the house people buy in various income groups. The result is an exercise that says a total of 15.9 bn square feet of additional residential space will be demanded between now and 2010. Around 1.5 per cent of this will be bought by the super rich, or those whose annual family income is more than Rs 1 crore (in 2001-02 prices) — this group, incidentally, forms just 0.06 per cent of the total population in the NCAER projections for 2009-10, but the bigger size of accommodation that crorepatis demand increases their share in residential space. All classes of rich, those earning more than Rs 10 lakh per year, will constitute 1.7 per cent of the 2009-10 population according to NCAER— in terms of accommodation, however, this group will comprise over 17 per cent of demand. So you know what type of houses to build now.