Developers · Market · The Propah POV
What does Bengaluru’s unsold inventory mean if you are launching now?
Bengaluru is carrying roughly 79,000 unsold homes — about fifteen months of supply at current absorption. That is not distress. What matters is the direction: inventory rose 34% in a year while the top seven cities averaged 10%. Your project is not facing a weak market. It is facing a crowded one.
The number everyone quotes, and the one that matters
In the April–June 2026 quarter, Anarock put Bengaluru’s available residential inventory at 79,180 units, with an inventory overhang of approximately fifteen months. Across the top seven cities the figure was 6.16 lakh units.
Fifteen months is not an alarming number. It is close to what the city has carried for years, and a long way from the forty-four months Delhi-NCR was sitting on before its correction. If you are being told Bengaluru has a glut, the person telling you is either selling you something or reading a headline.
The number that should hold your attention is the rate of change. Bengaluru’s unsold stock grew 34% year on year. The seven-city average grew 10%. Bengaluru is the outlier, and it is the outlier because of what happened on the supply side, not the demand side.
Demand did not fall. Supply arrived faster than demand could clear it — and it kept arriving.
This is a velocity problem, not a price problem
The tell is that prices went up while inventory went up. Anarock puts Bengaluru’s average quoted base price at around ₹9,450 per square foot in Q2 2026. Knight Frank, using its own methodology, reported the city’s average at ₹9,354 per square foot for the first half of 2026, a 9% rise year on year. Two houses, two methods, the same direction.
If buyers were rejecting Bengaluru pricing, prices would not be climbing. They are not rejecting the price. There are simply more doors to knock on, so each individual door waits longer.
That distinction decides what you do next. A price problem is solved with a price. A velocity problem is solved with positioning, sequencing and channel — and discounting into a velocity problem usually costs you margin without buying you speed, because the project next door can match your discount by Friday.
Who you are actually competing with
“79,000 units” is a useless competitive set. You are not competing with 79,000 homes. You are competing with the projects a buyer will physically see on the same Saturday, in the same corridor, in the same price band.
In Q2 2026 alone, three launches accounted for roughly 6,750 units between them — Sobha One at 3,484 units, Godrej Vanantara at 2,008 and Aparna Wonderwoods at 1,261, quoted at ₹13,500, ₹12,000 and ₹9,700 per square foot respectively. Those are well-capitalised launches with marketing budgets, brand recall and channel depth.
If your project sits in the same corridor and the same band, that is your competitive set. Not the city.
The band everyone crowded into
Here is where the overhang is actually concentrated, and it is the most useful thing in the data.
Anarock’s Q2 2026 Bengaluru launch mix shows 43% of new launches in the ₹1.5–2.5 crore band and a further 28% between ₹80 lakh and ₹1.5 crore. Nationally, launches priced above ₹2.5 crore made up 22% of the total, while affordable stock below ₹40 lakh was 6%.
Now put demand beside it. Knight Frank’s H1 2026 Bengaluru sales split by ticket size:
| Ticket size | Share of H1 2026 sales | Note |
|---|---|---|
| ₹1–2 crore | 45.8% | The volume band |
| ₹2–5 crore | 29.2% | Fastest growing, up 39% YoY |
| ₹75 lakh – ₹1 crore | 12.0% | |
| ₹50–75 lakh | 7.2% | |
| Under ₹50 lakh | 2.8% | Effectively vacated |
Read those two together honestly. Demand at ₹1–2 crore is real and large. Demand at ₹2–5 crore is growing fastest. Developers moved upmarket because that is where the margin and the demand growth are, and they were not wrong to.
But everyone made the same correct decision at the same time. The result is that the most competitive square foot in Bengaluru right now is the one priced between ₹1.5 crore and ₹2.5 crore in an East or South-East corridor. That is not where demand is absent. It is where differentiation is hardest.
Where the pressure is, and is not
- Most crowded: ₹1.5–2.5 crore, three-bedroom, in the established IT corridors. Highest launch volume, strongest brand competition, hardest to differentiate on product alone.
- Thinnest supply: below ₹50 lakh, which developers have effectively exited — but it is thin on demand too, at 2.8% of sales, so this is not a gap to run into without a specific reason.
- Moving fastest: ₹2–5 crore, up 39% year on year, but from a base where product quality and location are genuinely scrutinised and a mediocre project does not clear.
Corridors are not interchangeable
Quoted prices in Q2 2026 tell you how differently the city is priced. Anarock puts Electronic City at around ₹7,450 per square foot, Whitefield at ₹10,850 and Sarjapur Road at ₹11,560. Quarterly movement across those was modest — 1% to 3%.
A ₹1.8 crore ticket buys quite different things in those three places, which means it attracts quite different buyers. Positioning your project against “the Bengaluru market” is a category error. Position it against the four or five projects your buyer will actually shortlist.
Why demand softened, and whether it stays soft
Nationally, sales across the top seven cities fell 6% year on year in Q2 2026 to 90,715 units. Anarock attributed the dip largely to sentiment — the effects of the West Asia conflict on the sector, and uncertainty in the technology and AI sectors, pushing buyers to defer rather than abandon decisions.
Bengaluru is more exposed to that second factor than any other Indian city, because its residential demand is unusually tied to technology employment. The same quarter saw 14.1 million square feet of office space transacted in the city in the first half of 2026, with about 60% driven by global capability centres — which is a real signal that the employment base is not going anywhere.
Deferred demand is different from destroyed demand. But deferred demand still has to be sold to, and it will be sold to by whoever is in front of it when the buyer re-engages.
What this actually changes for you
- Your absorption assumptions. If your feasibility was built on a city-average sales velocity from two years ago, it is now optimistic. Rebuild it on your corridor and your band, not the city.
- Your launch sequencing. Releasing full inventory into the most crowded quarter of the year buys visibility you cannot convert. Phasing costs you nothing and protects your price.
- Your cost of carry. Fifteen months of overhang is fifteen months of finance cost, maintenance and marketing on unsold stock. Velocity is not a vanity metric; it is the difference between a project that returns and one that erodes.
- Your channel. In a crowded band, more brokers is not more sales — it is the same buyer being called four times by four people telling four different stories about your project.
- Your positioning. When the buyer’s shortlist has five comparable projects at a comparable price, the one that gets bought is the one they understood fastest.
In a thin market you sell on price. In a crowded market you sell on clarity.
The honest case for a single accountable channel
We take sales and marketing mandates, so treat this as an argument we have an interest in — and judge it on whether it holds.
The default in Bengaluru is open distribution: list with everyone, pay on closure, hope volume finds you a buyer. In a market where your project is one of many in its band, that produces noise. The buyer hears about your project from several people who have not seen it, cannot answer a question about the approvals, and are equally happy selling them the project next door.
A single accountable channel — whether that is us, another firm, or a properly resourced in-house team — does something different. One story, told consistently. A named person who knows the project, the approvals and the honest weaknesses. Feedback that comes back to you as information rather than as excuses. And a view of who is walking away and why, which is the single most valuable and most commonly discarded data in a slow-moving project.
That is worth arguing about on the merits. What it is not is a guarantee — nobody can promise absorption in a market where supply grew 41% in a year, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does.
If you are holding stock right now
- Find out where you actually sit. Count the competing projects in your corridor and your band, not in the city. If that number is under six, you have a positioning problem you can solve. If it is over twenty, you have a sequencing decision to make.
- Interrogate the drop-offs. The buyers who visited and did not buy are telling you something specific. Most developers never systematically collect it.
- Protect the headline price, negotiate elsewhere. Once your quoted rate drops it resets every future buyer’s expectation and every existing buyer’s grievance. Payment plans, inventory choice and fit-out are recoverable. A cut rate is not.
- Do not launch the next phase into your own unsold stock. It is the most common self-inflicted wound in a crowded market.
What this does not cover
- Consultancies count differently. Anarock and Knight Frank publish different sales and supply figures for the same city and period because their definitions of launch, sale and available inventory differ. Both are internally consistent; comparing across them is not. Pick one series and track it.
- “Available inventory” includes under-construction unsold units, not only completed unsold ones. A project two years from handover and a finished tower both count, and they are commercially very different problems.
- Figures here are Q2 2026 (April to June) and H1 2026 — the most recent published at the time of writing. Q3 data will move them.
- This is market commentary, not project advice. What it means for a specific project depends on its corridor, band, stage, approvals and cost of capital.
How many unsold homes are there in Bengaluru?
Approximately 79,180 units as at the April–June 2026 quarter, per Anarock — up about 34% year on year, and equivalent to roughly fifteen months of supply at the current rate of absorption. Across India’s top seven cities the figure was 6.16 lakh units, up 10%.
Is Bengaluru oversupplied?
Not in the sense the word usually implies. Fifteen months of inventory is a workable number — Delhi-NCR carried forty-four months before its correction. But Bengaluru’s inventory grew 34% in a year against a seven-city average of 10%, which makes it crowded rather than oversupplied. The distinction matters: crowded markets are won on velocity and positioning, oversupplied ones on price.
What is inventory overhang and what is a healthy figure?
It is how long the existing unsold stock would take to clear at the current rate of sales, expressed in months or quarters. Roughly twelve to eighteen months is generally treated as balanced. Well below that suggests undersupply and rising prices; well above it — thirty months and up — indicates a market that will correct on price. Bengaluru is inside the balanced range at about fifteen months.
Why are Bengaluru prices rising if inventory is rising too?
Because buyers are not rejecting the price, they are taking longer to choose between more options. Anarock put the average quoted base price at around ₹9,450 per square foot in Q2 2026; Knight Frank reported ₹9,354 per square foot for H1 2026, up 9% year on year. Rising construction costs and a launch mix that has shifted upmarket both push the average up independently of demand.
Which price band is most crowded in Bengaluru right now?
₹1.5–2.5 crore. Anarock’s Q2 2026 data puts 43% of Bengaluru’s new launches in that band, with a further 28% between ₹80 lakh and ₹1.5 crore. Demand there is genuine — Knight Frank shows ₹1–2 crore at 45.8% of H1 sales — but so is the competition, which makes it the hardest band to differentiate in on product alone.
Should I delay my launch?
Delay is rarely the answer on its own, because carrying cost runs whether you launch or not. Phasing usually is. Releasing a controlled first phase lets you establish a price, read genuine buyer response and hold inventory back rather than discounting it later. Launching everything into the most crowded band in the city produces visibility you cannot convert.
Does a rising overhang mean I should cut prices?
Not as a first move. In a crowded rather than a weak market, a price cut is matched by competitors within days, so you lose margin without gaining velocity — and you reset expectations for every future buyer while annoying everyone who has already booked. Payment structure, inventory choice and fit-out allowances are recoverable concessions. A published rate cut is not.
Is technology-sector uncertainty going to keep demand down?
Sentiment clearly softened during the quarter — Anarock pointed to the West Asia conflict and AI-sector uncertainty as reasons buyers deferred decisions. But Bengaluru absorbed 14.1 million square feet of office space in H1 2026, about 60% of it from global capability centres, which says the employment base underpinning residential demand is intact. Deferred demand still has to be sold to.
Market figures are from Anarock’s Q2 2026 residential data (April to June 2026), including its Bengaluru market viewpoint, and from Knight Frank India’s H1 2026 Bengaluru report, checked at source in September 2026. Consultancies define launches, sales and available inventory differently and their figures for the same city and period do not reconcile — both are quoted here with attribution rather than blended. An earlier version of our published queue cited 64,863 units and 23% annual growth from the 2025 data; the current figures supersede it. Q3 2026 data will move these numbers again.
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