Five years of YEIDA prices: what the data actually says

Corridor price talk is dominated by two numbers: the biggest gain anyone can remember, and the asking price of the plot being sold to you right now. Neither is the market.

Three different prices, constantly confused

• The authority rate — what YEIDA charges in a scheme. Revised by notification, and the same for everyone.
• The transacted resale price — what plots actually changed hands for. The hardest to see, and the only one that describes the market.
• The asking price — what a seller or a listing portal says. Free to state, and under no obligation to be achievable.

Almost every dramatic claim about corridor appreciation is an asking price compared against an old authority rate. That comparison is meaningless: the two numbers are not measuring the same thing.

What moved, and what moved it

Across the last five years the corridor's price behaviour clusters around events, not calendar quarters. Announcements move asking prices immediately and transacted prices barely at all. Completions move both, with a lag.

The pattern repeats: a milestone is announced, listings reprice within weeks, then a long flat stretch while the market waits to see whether the milestone lands. Sellers who bought into the announcement and needed to exit during the flat stretch are the ones who took losses.

Proximity is not one variable

"Near the airport" does an enormous amount of unexamined work in corridor pricing. Two plots equidistant from the same terminal can behave completely differently depending on which road actually connects them, what the adjoining land use is notified as, and whether the sector has services in the ground yet.

• Road connectivity that exists, not connectivity that is planned.
• Notified adjacent land use — industrial next door prices differently from institutional.
• Whether the sector has been developed and serviced, or only notified.
• Depth of end-user demand, as distinct from investor churn.

How to read a claimed comparable

When someone quotes you a comparable transaction, ask three questions: when did it register, what exactly was the plot, and was it a distress sale. A comparable that fails any of those is an anecdote.

We do not publish a sector-by-sector rate table here on purpose. A number in an article ages badly and gets quoted long after it is wrong. Ask the desk for the current position on a specific sector and you will get it with its date attached.

The honest summary

The corridor has repriced substantially over five years, and it has done so unevenly, in steps, with long flat periods in between. Sectors with real infrastructure and real end-user demand have held their gains. Sectors that priced an announcement have given a good deal of it back at least once.

That is a market worth being in with a horizon and a plan. It is a bad market to be in with a short timeline and a story.