Bhubaneswar Most Affordable City For Home Buyers: RBI Survey

Bhubaneswar is the most affordable city for home buyers in India, while Mumbai remains the least affordable, according to a survey by the Reserve Bank of India.

The RBI’s latest Quarterly Residential Asset Price Survey, which was released on Thursday, said Bhubaneswar was the most affordable city for home buying with a price-to-income ratio of 54.3 in the March quarter compared to 47.2 in March 2015.

The concept of price-to-income ratio is used by lenders to measure affordability of residential property, essentially as a measure of purchasing power for home buyers.

On a pan-India basis, the survey showed that the house price-to-income ratio in the country increased in the last four years from 56.1 in the 2015 March quarter to 61.5 in the corresponding period of 2019.

Significantly, due to slower growth in residential demand in the last four years, home prices have dropped or remained stagnant in major cities such as Mumbai and Delhi-NCR.

The RBI has been conducting the quarterly residential asset price survey since July 2010 on housing loans disbursed by select banks and housing finance companies across 13 cities— Ahmedabad, Bhubaneswar, Bengaluru, Bhopal, Chandigarh, Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, Jaipur, Kolkata, Lucknow, Mumbai and Pune.