IIM Bangalore and Square Yards Join Hands to Build India's First Credible Property Price Index

For decades, one of the more persistent frustrations voiced by homebuyers, investors, lenders, and policymakers navigating India's residential real estate market has been the absence of a single, credible, transparent benchmark for tracking how property prices actually move over time — a gap that stands in stark contrast to mature global housing markets, where standardised price indices have long served as foundational public infrastructure for everything from mortgage underwriting to macroeconomic policy formulation. That gap is now set to be addressed through a newly announced multi-year collaboration between the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore and Square Yards, one of India's largest integrated proptech platforms, formally unveiled on July 17, 2026.

**What exactly is being built**

Under the collaboration, led on the academic side by IIM Bangalore's Real Estate Research Initiative, the partnership aims to develop and publish what both organisations describe as a "robust, methodologically sound property price index for India" — a benchmark specifically designed to track how residential property prices move across the country over time, providing homebuyers, investors, lenders, policymakers, and researchers with a consistent, transparent reference point in a market that has historically been characterised by fragmented and often inconsistent pricing information sourced from a patchwork of brokers, developers, and informal market intelligence sources of varying reliability.

**The data foundation: scale and depth**

The scale of the underlying data foundation supporting this index is genuinely substantial. Square Yards will contribute anonymised and aggregated data drawn from across its broader data intelligence ecosystem, encompassing more than 150 million property registration data points alongside government guidance values, commonly known as circle rates, Real Estate Regulatory Authority filings, actual transaction records, and property listing data spanning markets across the country. This breadth and depth of underlying data — built up over more than a decade of Square Yards' operations as one of India's most comprehensive real estate data aggregators — represents precisely the kind of large-scale, granular dataset that credible, statistically robust price indices in more mature housing markets have historically depended upon, and which India's real estate sector has, until now, largely lacked in a single, unified, academically validated form.

**The academic rigour: IIMB's role**

While Square Yards brings the scale and granularity of transaction-level data, IIM Bangalore's Real Estate Research Initiative brings the academic credibility and methodological rigour essential to producing an index that market participants, policymakers, and researchers can trust as an independent, unbiased benchmark rather than a proprietary marketing tool for either partner organisation. Under the terms of the collaboration, IIMB will lead the design of the index methodology and underlying statistical model, explicitly retaining full academic freedom and publication rights over the research it conducts using the jointly assembled dataset — a structural safeguard specifically intended to preserve the index's credibility as an independent benchmark rather than a commercially motivated construct. Professor Venkatesh Panchapagesan, Chairperson of the Real Estate Research Initiative and a member of IIM Bangalore's Finance and Accounting faculty, framed the collaboration's core value proposition directly: Indian housing markets have historically lacked the transparent, high-frequency price benchmarks that mature markets take for granted, and this partnership's value lies specifically in combining the scale and granularity of Square Yards' data with a rigorous, transparent, and independently developed academic methodology.

**Why this matters for different market participants**

The practical implications of a credible, widely trusted property price index extend across a remarkably broad range of stakeholders in India's real estate and financial ecosystem. For homebuyers, a transparent benchmark offers a far more reliable reference point for assessing whether a specific property or locality is fairly priced relative to broader market trends, reducing information asymmetry that has historically favoured sellers, brokers, and developers over individual buyers navigating often opaque local market dynamics. For lenders and mortgage providers, a credible index offers a valuable tool for risk assessment, collateral valuation, and portfolio-level exposure monitoring — functions that have historically relied on considerably less standardised and less frequently updated valuation approaches in the Indian context compared to markets with established housing price indices. For policymakers and macroeconomic researchers, a robust, high-frequency property price index provides an essential input for monitoring housing market stability, informing monetary policy considerations around asset price inflation, and tracking regional disparities in housing affordability and price appreciation across India's diverse metropolitan and semi-urban markets.

**Square Yards' strategic rationale**

Commenting on the partnership, Square Yards Founder and CEO Tanuj Shori articulated the company's underlying motivation in terms that extended beyond immediate commercial considerations, framing the initiative as an opportunity to convert the company's decade-plus of data infrastructure investment into a broader public good for India's real estate ecosystem. Shori specifically noted that the company had spent over a decade building one of the most comprehensive real estate data ecosystems in India, spanning registrations, transactions, listings, and government benchmarks nationwide, and had "always believed this data can serve a purpose far larger than our own business." He characterised the partnership with IIM Bangalore as allowing the company to "put that data intelligence to work for the entire market," describing a credible, independent property price index as exactly the kind of public infrastructure Indian real estate has long needed. This framing — positioning the index as shared market infrastructure rather than a proprietary Square Yards product — is reinforced by the partnership's explicit structure: the index is designed as a shared reference for the broader market, with IIMB retaining the right to publish research and findings using the data, while duly acknowledging Square Yards as the underlying data provider.

**How this compares to existing housing price data in India**

India has not been entirely without housing price data prior to this initiative — various government bodies, private research firms, and real estate portals have periodically published price trend data and locality-level pricing information. However, market participants have long noted that much of this existing data has suffered from inconsistent methodology across sources, limited transaction-level granularity, infrequent updates, and — in the case of purely commercial real estate portal data — potential conflicts of interest given that many existing data providers also operate commercial listing or brokerage businesses with direct financial interest in how pricing trends are presented. The explicit structural separation built into the IIMB-Square Yards partnership, with IIMB retaining independent academic control over methodology and publication while Square Yards serves purely as a data contributor, is specifically designed to address this credibility gap that has limited the influence and adoption of prior housing price data initiatives in the Indian market.

**International parallels and precedents**

The broader concept of academic-industry collaboration to produce credible housing price indices has well-established precedent in more mature global real estate markets, with indices such as the Case-Shiller Home Price Index in the United States — itself the product of academic research subsequently commercialised and widely adopted as an industry-standard benchmark — offering a useful reference point for how a similarly structured India-focused index might eventually achieve comparable market credibility and widespread adoption across the lending, investment, and policy communities. The IIMB-Square Yards partnership's emphasis on both data scale and academic rigour suggests an explicit ambition to build toward that kind of foundational market infrastructure status over its multi-year collaboration horizon, rather than producing a one-off research report or a narrowly scoped commercial data product.

**What comes next**

With the partnership newly announced, the coming months and years will be defined by the practical work of building out the underlying statistical methodology, validating the index against real-world market observations, and progressively expanding coverage across India's diverse metropolitan, tier-two, and tier-three residential markets. Given the scale of the underlying data assembled and the academic credibility IIM Bangalore brings to the methodology design process, real estate market participants — from individual homebuyers to institutional lenders and policymakers — will likely be watching the initial index publications closely once they become available, evaluating whether this collaboration succeeds in finally delivering the kind of transparent, trusted housing price benchmark that India's real estate sector has lacked for so long relative to more data-mature global housing markets.

**Addressing India's fragmented real estate data problem**

The scale of the data fragmentation problem this partnership aims to solve is worth appreciating in some detail. Unlike more mature markets where standardised property registration systems and centralised data repositories have long enabled research institutions to build reliable price indices, India's real estate data landscape has historically been split across numerous state-level and even municipal-level registration systems, each with differing data formats, disclosure standards, and levels of digitisation. This fragmentation has made it extraordinarily difficult for any single research effort — academic or commercial — to assemble a genuinely national, methodologically consistent dataset covering the breadth of transaction types and geographies necessary to build a credible countrywide price index. Square Yards' decade-plus of effort systematically aggregating and standardising data across this fragmented landscape represents precisely the kind of unglamorous but foundational data infrastructure work that has been the primary bottleneck preventing earlier attempts at building a genuinely national Indian property price index from achieving comparable scale and credibility.

**Potential applications in monetary policy and macroprudential regulation**

Beyond its direct utility to individual homebuyers, lenders, and investors, a credible national property price index carries potentially significant implications for India's monetary policy and macroprudential regulatory apparatus as well. Central banks and financial regulators in more mature markets routinely incorporate housing price index data into their broader macroeconomic and financial stability monitoring frameworks, using sustained divergence between housing price growth and underlying income growth as an early warning indicator of potential asset bubble formation, or using regional price index data to calibrate loan-to-value regulations and other macroprudential tools targeted at specific overheating local markets. India's Reserve Bank and financial regulators have historically had to rely on considerably less granular and less frequently updated housing price proxies for these purposes, making a credible, high-frequency, geographically granular index of the kind IIM Bangalore and Square Yards are targeting a potentially valuable addition to the policy toolkit available for monitoring and managing housing-market-related financial stability risks going forward.

**Implications for real estate investment products**

A credible, independently validated property price index could also unlock further development within India's still-nascent real estate investment product ecosystem, including real estate investment trusts and other securitised property investment vehicles that have historically struggled to offer investors reliable, standardised benchmarks against which to evaluate underlying portfolio performance relative to broader market trends. Fund managers and financial product designers building real estate-linked investment products have long cited the absence of a credible national price benchmark as a structural constraint limiting the sophistication of available real estate investment products in India, relative to more mature markets where established indices support a considerably broader range of index-linked and benchmark-relative real estate investment strategies. Should the IIMB-Square Yards index achieve the kind of widespread market credibility and adoption its backers are targeting, it could plausibly serve as a foundational building block for a new generation of more sophisticated Indian real estate investment products over the coming years, ultimately benefiting the very homebuyers and investors the initiative was designed to serve through a more transparent, data-driven residential property market. As India's real estate sector continues its gradual formalisation journey, initiatives of this kind — grounded in rigorous data and independent academic oversight — may well come to be seen as some of the most consequential, if quietly built, infrastructure of the sector's next growth phase.

**Building trust through transparency**

A final, often underappreciated element central to the credibility of any price index is the transparency with which its underlying methodology is communicated to the broader market. Unlike proprietary commercial data products that may keep their exact calculation methodologies confidential for competitive reasons, the explicit commitment from IIM Bangalore to retain full academic freedom and publication rights suggests the eventual index methodology will be made available for public and academic scrutiny in a manner consistent with standard peer-reviewed research practices. This commitment to methodological transparency, rather than treating the index as a closely guarded proprietary asset, is likely to prove decisive in determining whether the index ultimately achieves the kind of broad-based market trust and adoption that has eluded previous, less rigorously validated attempts at building comparable Indian housing price benchmarks.