IIM Bangalore and Square Yards launch a multi-year collaboration to create a transparent, data-driven property price index for Indian housing markets.
A new benchmark for India’s housing market
IIM Bangalore (IIMB), through its Real Estate Research Initiative (RERI), has partnered with proptech platform Square Yards to build a residential property price index for India. The multi-year collaboration aims to produce a transparent, data-driven benchmark that tracks how housing prices move across the country over time. The initiative targets homebuyers, investors, lenders, policymakers and researchers who currently operate in a market marked by fragmented and inconsistent price information.
Why a property price index matters
Indian housing markets have long lacked high-frequency, credible price benchmarks that are common in more mature real estate markets. Without a reliable index, households and institutions often rely on scattered listings, anecdotal evidence or local brokers to judge price trends. A statistically robust property price index can help buyers time their purchases better, allow banks to refine risk models, and give policymakers clearer visibility into regional and national housing cycles. It also offers researchers a foundation for analysing affordability, bubbles and investment patterns.
Data backbone: Square Yards’ ecosystem
Square Yards will supply anonymised and aggregated data drawn from its extensive data intelligence ecosystem. This includes more than 150 million property registration data points, government guidance values (circle rates), Real Estate Regulatory Authority (Rera) data, primary transaction records from its platform and residential listings. Sharing this data periodically will support index construction, updates and related academic research. By combining registration records, official guidance values and market transactions, the collaboration can capture both formal and actual price movements.
IIMB’s role: methodology and academic independence
Under the partnership, IIM Bangalore will lead the design of the index methodology and the underlying scientific model. The institute will retain full academic freedom and publication rights over the research it conducts using the data. This structure ensures that the index is built on a peer-reviewed statistical approach rather than on opaque proprietary formulas. Prof. Venkatesh Panchapagesan, chairperson of RERI and faculty in finance and accounting, emphasised that the collaboration’s value lies in marrying the scale and granularity of Square Yards’ data with a rigorous, transparent and independently developed methodology.
Building an index that stands up to scrutiny
Square Yards will provide the data, and IIM Bangalore will supply the methodological backbone to jointly develop the property price index. The aim is to create a benchmark that can withstand academic scrutiny and serve as a trusted reference across the ecosystem. A robust index will need to address challenges such as heterogeneity in properties, regional variations, changes in quality over time and differences between registered values and transaction prices. IIMB’s research team is also expected to tackle these complexities through careful modelling and statistical techniques.
Square Yards’ vision for public data infrastructure
Square Yards’ founder and CEO, Tanuj Shori, noted that the company has spent over a decade building one of India’s most comprehensive real estate data ecosystems. The collaboration with IIMB allows this data to serve a purpose beyond the firm’s own business interests. A credible, independent price index is framed as a piece of public infrastructure that the Indian real estate market has lacked. By opening its data in anonymised form for academic use, Square Yards also positions itself as a key data provider in a larger effort to improve transparency and efficiency.
Shared reference, not a proprietary product
According to IIMB and Square Yards, the index is designed to be a shared market reference rather than a proprietary, paywalled product. IIMB will publish research and findings based on the data, with Square Yards acknowledged as the data provider. Both organisations will be free to use the jointly developed index in their research, reporting and business activities. This open stance is intended to support wider adoption – by banks, developers, analysts, rating agencies and government bodies – and could help standardise how property price movements are discussed and measured.
Benefits for stakeholders across the ecosystem
For homebuyers, a transparent index can provide a clearer sense of whether local prices are rising, stabilising or declining, and how their chosen city compares to national trends. For investors and lenders, it can improve portfolio risk assessment and pricing of mortgage products. Policymakers can use the index to monitor housing markets, design targeted interventions and track the impact of policy changes on affordability and construction activity. Academic researchers also gain access to a structured, data-rich foundation for studying urbanisation, household finance and housing policy.
Towards a more data-driven real estate market
If the collaboration succeeds, it could mark a significant shift from a largely opaque housing market towards one guided by robust, public benchmarks. Over time, the property price index may become a standard reference akin to stock market indices in equity markets. That would not eliminate local variation or the need for due diligence, but it would give every stakeholder a more reliable starting point. In a sector that touches household wealth, financial stability and urban development, IIM Bangalore and Square Yards’ initiative has the potential to reshape how India understands and navigates property prices.
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