Affordable housing a critical gap in India’s real estate boom

India’s property market has gone from strength to strength. All the main sectors continue to perform extremely well. Last year, take-up of shopping centre and warehouse space reached record highs. In the first half of this year, office leasing volumes rose to their second-highest level for the period on record, while new flat sales in the eight largest cities delivered one of the strongest half-yearly performances in 12 years.Even the institutional investment market, the least liquid among the largest economies in the Asia-Pacific, has taken off. In 2024-25, transaction volumes reached nearly US$20 billion, more than double the amount recorded in 2021-22.However, the boom in Indian real estate masks a vulnerability that has become more acute in recent years. As India struggles to capitalise on its much-touted demographic dividend and fears about artificial intelligence-induced disruption to the nation’s pivotal information technology (IT) services and outsourcing industry intensify, the dramatic supply crunch in the low-to-mid-end of the housing market is coming under scrutiny.