Touted as the year of market recovery, 2021 in retrospect had its own share of dips and surges when it comes to home buying trends. To everyone’s surprise, trends across the market changed, and only a handful of them were in favor of the stakeholders. Echoing similar beliefs, home buying demands also underwent a significant transition. This further aligned the real estate industry to the consumers’ needs like never before, making space for more home buyers to enter in the market.
Despite half of the total residential searches concentrated in the mid-income housing category, more than 43% of the home buying searches were for 3BHK and larger configurations during 2021. Though affordability continued to be the main driving force fuelling the home buying trends, one cannot entirely negate that more prospective home buyers are still “eyeing the extra space”. Home buyers were quite willing to spend a little extra, provided they were offered more upgraded and more spacious home units. To be precise, residential units which goes well in the context of the prevailing challenges posed by the pandemic.
Apart from it, as most of the home buyers continued to juggle between the choice of whether to opt for spacious units or to prioritize their savings by cutting down on the home buying budget, the concept of “flex rooms” was in the limelight. This is expected to remain so for upcoming quarters as well. Approbating the same, the Square Yards online search trends unveiled that the quarter post the second lockdown (Q3, 2021) saw a considerable quarterly rise of at least 50% in demand for flex rooms consisting of configurations mainly 1.5BHK, 2.5BHK and 3.5BHK.
The year 2021, clearly made it evident that the definition of an “ideal home” has changed on a wider scale. The same was gradually reflected on the inventory offered by the developers and is still awaiting few revisions.
Taking cognizance of such key developments, at Square Yards, we connected a few dots for you and tried to draw a more realistic portrayal of the home buying sentiments at large. To view the analysis, download the document here.
