How we are paid, what we refuse, and where a person still decides

How Propah is paid, and why we publish it

Almost everyone giving you property advice in India is paid by the person selling the property. That is not a scandal, it is just the structure — and you cannot evaluate advice without knowing it.

Our engagements fall into three kinds, and the honest thing is to say which side pays in each:

• Buying with us. Where we source and execute a purchase for you in Bengaluru, we are typically remunerated on the transaction, in the way brokerage conventionally works in this market.
• Consulting with us. Standalone professional advice — portfolio review, a decision between markets, a second opinion on something you have been offered — is a paid consultation. You pay us, which is precisely what makes it independent.
• Appointing us. On the supply side we take sales and marketing mandates from developers and landowners, paid by them, at rates negotiated per mandate. The market ranges are published here.

The rule that matters: on any single transaction, you should always know which chair we are sitting in. We do not present a mandate we are paid to sell as neutral advice, and when we are advising you as a buyer we will tell you if a property in question is one we are mandated on.

Specific fees are quoted per engagement, in writing, before work begins. If a fee is not written down, do not proceed — with us or with anyone.

You cannot judge advice without knowing who pays for it. So we publish who pays for ours.

The advice that costs us money

An advisory that only ever says yes is a sales function with better manners. Here is what saying no looks like in practice — all of it published on this site, where you can check it:

• We tell developers that exclusivity without targets is worse than an open arrangement. We sell exclusive mandates. Saying this makes them harder to sell, and it is still true — you remove competitive pressure and put nothing in its place. The full argument.
• We tell NRIs that Dubai’s zero tax does not apply to them if they are resident in India. India taxes worldwide income, so the headline that sells Dubai to Indian residents is not true for them. Here.
• We publish the flat-price row first. On a leveraged purchase, a decade of flat prices returns 0.58 times your money — a real loss. That is the row we lead with, before the optimistic ones. Here.
• We tell buyers the yield they were quoted is not the yield they get. 3.6% gross becomes 1.98% after costs and tax. Here.
• We say when we do not know. Where published sources genuinely conflict — on Karnataka power-of-attorney stamp duty, on whether a guidance value revision has been gazetted — we say so rather than pick the convenient figure.

None of that is generosity. It is the only way advice is worth anything: you should be able to predict when we will disagree with you, and it should not depend on what we are selling.

A decade in real estate, and “guaranteed returns”

Nobody can guarantee a return on property, and anyone offering one is either misdescribing the arrangement or has priced a discount into it that you have not agreed to yet.

Consider what would have to be true. Bengaluru’s unsold inventory rose 34% in a year while launches ran far ahead of sales. Dubai rents fell 6.2% in a single quarter against a record completion pipeline. Indian metros have had flat stretches lasting a decade. A guarantee across that is not confidence — it is a promise funded by something you have not been shown.

Common forms it takes: assured rental schemes where the “assured” rent is already embedded in an inflated purchase price; buyback commitments from an entity with no balance sheet to honour them; and appreciation projections drawn from the single most flattering series available. Three published prices for one Bengaluru locality sit 35% apart — which is how a confident projection gets built.

What can honestly be offered instead: a clear statement of what is known and what is not, arithmetic you can reproduce, and the downside case modelled before the upside one.

Where we use AI, and where a person still decides

The research on this site is AI-assisted, and we would rather say so plainly than have you work it out.

Two commitments follow. Every figure is attributed and dated, so you can check it rather than trust it — and where we have corrected ourselves, we have said so on the page. No AI system advises a client. Your circumstances, your risk, and the recommendation you act on are a person’s judgment, and the person is accountable for it.

We think disclosure here will matter more over time, not less. A firm that will not tell you how its research is produced is telling you something anyway.

Still deciding, or want this applied to your own situation?

Tell us where you are and we will come back to you. The first conversation is free, and we will tell you plainly if we are not the right people for it.

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