Property in Ahmedabad the 5th Most Polluted City in India

There may be storm clouds ahead for the city of Ahmedabad. The storm clouds though may be unburned hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide interacting with sunlight resulting in the city being covered in smog. Whatever be the price of progress, surely unlivable cities is not one worth paying. The city of Ahmedabad is now the 5^th most polluted in the country and despite the healthy cost of property in Ahmedabad the cost of living in the city may not be worth it for some.

How is it that a culture that nearly equates nature with the divine has turned it back on its values to wholeheartedly embrace foreign values of which it knows nearly nothing, values the originators themselves know little about.

It is indeed not completely unlike the moment of the first nuclear test in history when scientists had unleashed the nuclear genie and which once released could not be put back in the bottle. We live daily with the repercussions of that event nearly 70 years on, the majority of which time most in the world wondered about the likelihood of mutually assured destruction as two superpowers armed with nuclear weapons faced off. Today the same threat remains alive in the form of the bomb finding its way into the hands of extremists.

The danger from industrial gasses and carbon emissions is a far more subtle and slow acting problem which some today even debate the validity of. However most agree that the end result of the release of gases into the atmosphere will in likelihood be not too dissimilar from that which we thought we had avoided after the end of the cold war.  In the end our planet may become uninhabitable for human life.

Regardless of what happens in the future many are paying the ultimate price today. Though people in the prosperous state of Gujarat continue to buy property in Ahmedabad, being attracted to the city for the opportunities it presents, some may find the hard way that to by owing real estate property in Ahmedabad they paid a price that was far in excess of what they intended to.

This to some may sound like fearmongering, but the facts bear out. Many geologists and climatologists have already coined a new term for our epoch in order to separate it from earlier ones. Whereas the time of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago was termed the Jurassic, our inchoate epoch too has a term separating it from the previous epoch. Our current epoch is very recent, beginning only a few decades ago when humans began to alter the planets ecosystem drastically by releasing greenhouse gasses and other pollutants into the atmosphere. We are drastically changing the planet and nobody knows where it will lead to.

I would still say that the top builders in Ahmedabad will make lots of profits in the future; they shall continue to build property in Ahmedabad and school their children in Shimla or Switzerland. Their customers, the ones who actually buy property in Ahmedabad to live at, may in the long run pay a heavy price.

Ahmedabad Property

I have given an ambiguous title to this article as the city of Ahmedabad is so vast with so much buying and selling in the city’s real estate sector that to give a precise overview of what’s happening in real estate in Ahmedabad. I had to be as open-ended as possible.

Let’s take a closer look at Nikol, a locality about 15 kilometers from Ahmedabad. If you are looking for property in Ahmedabad, you simply must consider Nikol as the location of your new home.  The prices of less than 2000 rupees per square foot for an apartment here might entice you.

Developments in Nikol which are among the new projects in Ahmedabad, offer the chance to own real estate in Ahmedabad for slightly more than 30 lakhs. The projects have 3 BHK flats with close to 1400 square feet of carpet area priced at 32 lakhs. What really makes these projects stand out is that they have appreciated by over 20% in the past 3 years.

If you have a budged of less than 20 lakhs and want to invest it in property in Ahmedabad; a development at Nikol offers the buyer a neat 2 BHK home for approximately 18 lakhs.  The size of the unit in question is 900 square feet and the development is less than 5 years old.

Just a few kilometers from Nikol, is the neighborhood of Nava Naroda. Like Nikol, Nava Naroda offers apartments in Ahmedabad at very affordable prices. Buying a home in these localities may not just make a good investment as a second home but also perhaps even a third home.  

A recently completed development at Nara Naroda has appreciated by nearly 24% over the past 3 years; which makes both these regions of the city great places to invest as prices here are still quite low, and will the recent home owner friendly measures by the RBI, are likely to rise further as demand for housing booms across the nation.

Despite my enthusiasm for these promising regions of Ahmedabad and the large number of new developments at Nikol, Nara Naroda; these locations are still not prime real estate destinations per say i.e. there are hardly any developments here by any of the top builders in Ahmedabad. There are however many good developments here which still warrant our attention as home buyers and overlooking these upcoming parts of Ahmedabad would be unjustified.

Most of the properties in these localities are less than 10 years old and the overwhelming majority may be less than 6 years old. Real estate developers in Ahmedabad who build here are competent and some such developers may one day launch projects as large as any in the country, few however are currently as well-known as Lodha, DLF or Godrej.

Property in Ahmedabad may still be in an incipient state when compared to larger cities like Mumbai, however this makes the localities mentioned above even more attractive to buyers as once the real estate market in Ahmedabad matures further bringing with it greater inflows of capital, prices are bound to rise all across the board.

Property in Ahmedabad

A colleague with whom I had reconnected after a gap of several years had often expressed a moderate dislike of our current Prime Minister, he felt that perhaps our country needed a gentler leader rather than an (as he saw it) a slightly authoritarian one. 

It turned out that my friend was a claustrophobic and could never bear to stand in an elevator no matter how short the trip. Eventually he bought a home in Satellite. I knew that there were more affordable homes in Ahmedabad than the upscale part of Satellite, I knew of real estate developers in Ahmedabad whose homes sold for only about a crore. Yet the property my friend had bought at Satellite cost well over 2 crore.

That’s when I realized that I had misjudged; my friend and I were most likely separated by more than 3 paygrades.

Imagine my surprise when upon our last meeting he could not stop gushing with praise for Mr. Modi, I asked him what had brought about this change. It turns out that he had been transferred by his consultancy firm and had been living in Ahmedabad for the past one and a half years. He remarked how wonderful it was, the seamless flow of traffic and the power supply which never failed. It would appear he was a changed man; living in a new city had transformed him from a staunch liberal into a moderate. But such stories are not out of the ordinary when the city in question is Ahmedabad.

My Colleague is now keen to keen to own a home in the Ahmedabad, so enamored is he with the city.

Property in Ahmedabad is among the most expensive in the state of Gujarat and the city is the financial hub of the prosperous state of Gujarat. Real Estate in Ahmedabad is relatively inexpensive as compared with other large areas such as the Mumbai Metropolitan Region and NCR. Even in the most upscale parts of the city rates for property in Ahmedabad can be below 6,200 Rupees per square foot.

Bodakdev, an affluent region of the city is witness to new projects in Ahmedabad by builders offering 4 BHK 4,500 square feet apartments for as low as 2 crore. One of the top builders in Ahmedabad such as the JP Iskon Group is among the developers building luxury apartments in this part of the city.

Several real estate developers in Ahmedabad have a large number of upcoming projects near the SG Highway which connects Ahmedabad to Gandhinagar. Among the top builders in Ahmedabad with upcoming projects on SG Highway are Arise Buildcon, Signature Group and Godrej Properties. These upcoming projects in Ahmedabad offer a great deal of diversity with an offering of flats ranging from 1 BHK up to 4 BHK.

One of the top builders in Ahmedabad, Nile Infrastructure Ahmedabad, has successfully constructed several affordable apartments in Ahmedabad in areas of the city such as Makarba. Most such new constructions cost less than 60 Lakhs making them homes to invest in; the size of most such properties varies from 1,300 to 1,800 square feet.

I was curious to ask my friend where he would invest his money; I knew that he was two or possibly three pay grades ahead of me and hence had could afford a larger home. I had guessed that he had been looking at luxury apartments in Ahmedabad yet was surprised to learn that eventually he settled on a house in the city.