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29 March 2024

Kerala Property Watch: Where to buy villa in Ernakulam

A person would be allowed to hold an acre of land in excess if he agrees to invest Rs5 crore. (Shutterstock)

Published
By Bobby Ninan & Vinay Thomas

From picturesque hills to sandy beaches, from meandering waterways to expansive forests, Kerala has something for everyone to love.

This is where tourists come for experience, retirees come for peace and families come for community. If you are one of those looking to settle down in this Kerala read on.
While you look to settle down in Kerala, you will need to understand the lay of the land.
This column will try to break it down for you by choosing a specific area or topic and performing a data based analysis of that topic.

This month we are going to talk about buying a villa in the most commercially active district in Kerala - Ernakulam.

Let us start with the median price per square foot for villas in various cities/towns/panchayats in Ernakulam. These cities are ordered by distance from Cochin City center.


On looking at this graph, we can see that there are three peaks - Kadavanthara, Nedumbassery and Muvattupuzha. Kadavanthara, part of the Kochi Metropolitan area is home to the Greater Kochi Port Authority. Nedumbassery is home to the Kochi international airport and Muvattupuzha area is home to several places of worship with historical significance.
 
Below is a heat map that shows the time it takes to drive from one city to another in peak traffic. Looking at the heat map below we can see that the price per square feet has a close relation to distance of regions from the three regions identified before. 


The heatmap above is very useful if you want to identify a place to settle in Ernakulam.

Say your place of work is in Palarivattom and you can tolerate a travel time of 20 minutes, we see by following the column Palarivattom that Vyttila, Kadavanthra, Kaloor, Edappally and Kakkanad are good options to settle down. Now let us identify which among these places gives the best value for money. For this we are introducing a metric “percentage per minute”.

Let us take an example to explain it. Price per Sqft for Palarivattom is ₹5283.
Price per Sqft for Kizhakkambalam is ₹2450.

So Kizhakkambalam price is 100*(1-2450/5283)=53% lower than the price in Palarivattom. But Kizhakkambalam to Palarivattom is a 40 minute drive. Which means for every minute of driving time you are earning 53/40 = 1.33% reduction in price. We call this price reduction earned by driving time “percentage per minute” or PPM. Below is the heat map of the PPM in Ernakulam district.


Green are the spots with the highest PPM and thus the places that give the most value with respect to driving time and red are the worst value for money locations. Brown spots are somewhere in between. Clearly Edappally with respect to Palarivattom is the most value for money. Edappally gives you a 2.43% reduction for every minute of driving, which given Edappally is 10 minutes from Palarivattom means Edappally is 24.3% cheaper than Palarivattom.

Within the Kochi Metro area, Edappally is a good bet not only because it has the highest PPM but it has a pretty good PPM with respect a lot of locations, which means if you expect to travel regularly to different parts of Kochi then the PPM for all those places are pretty good. Kizhakkambalam is the best value for money Ernakulam wide since it has a decent PPM across the district.

This is a starting point for your search. After filtering the best options, make sure you go there and look around, experience the place and see if you can envision yourself living there.

Note: The writers are directors (marketing and engineering) of Kerala-based website www.lastplot.com