Sri lanka’s Real Estate Market Analysis — Residential Regions
It is no doubt that Sri Lankan Real estate market is one of the most ‘outdated’ markets.
The access to actionable insights lies within the grasp of few real estate agencies, brokers or premier real estate listing website. You gotta rely on them to tell you how the market behaves!
We are yet to come across an updated, analytical tool to look into the market before we make a buy,sell as an investment or for living.
Given that real estate purchase/sells usually start from millions, its unbelievable that still we have to rely heavily on ‘experts’ and their ‘good word’.
So therefore, couple of friends and I thought of bridging this gap, this article is an step towards that goal!
All comments & criticisms are welcome!
Ok so, how?
We collected publicly available real estate data, anything we can get our hands on. Then we cleaned that data dump to make the data ‘make sense’.
Then we asked few questions:
1.If i am to buy a land in {Enter Region}, whats the average price per perch I can expect?
2.Hmm, how many lands are up for selling in that price range?
3.Hmm, how many lands are up for selling in my price range?
4.Nice, what are the land sizes? What kind of plots are up for selling?
5.Okay, put them all together now, I want to see what Kiribathgoda has to offer.
(We used simple data analysis libraries and Simple Statistical methods to ask these questions from the data!)
Idea is, after we get answers to these, we have a pretty good idea on land sizes available, where lot of liquidity ( lot of bids) is, how the prices vary in the region. Solid start before calling people and listening to their crap on current market ‘valuation’.
We believe, when you are armed with this basic yet strong piece of information, you have a guide that will help you navigate the complex world of Sri lankan real estate!
Show me the Good Stuff!
So we started by looking at some areas where we are interested to buy lands!
Later, we looked at areas where its highly populated.. (the areas where people are ready to go knee-deep in debt to buy lands..) We thought those regions are good place to start the analysis.
Region 1 — Kiribathgoda
Why Start with Kiribathgoda? Idk why not?
Price Analysis:
See those spikes? It says;
Lot of lands are being offered around — 600,000–800,000 per perch
And the dotted line? It says;
The Average(Median) price per perch in Kiribathgoda — 650,000 per perch
Ok now you know the average price per perch, how about knowing the available land sizes?
Land Analysis:
Again those spikes? It says;
Most of the offered lands have sizes ranging from: 6–16 perch
If you are an investor, this could be an ideal land size for you.. lot of activity means, easily / quickly you can jump in & out of the market with competitive prices
And, If you are a residential land seeker, you can still see that there are 10+ lands ranging from 35+ perches, ideal for home making in my opinion.
Okay, now you know what are the price ranges in Kiribathgoda, what are the available land sizes, i believe you have done the napkin calculation and figured out if you are to buy a land, how much of LKR you need.
But there is one more thing,
Listing prices are sensitive to their proximity to roads and major landmarks
There could be better price points, better land sizes than going and blindly buying at average price?
Soo, You might want to get the full Kiribathgoda Picture and dive into it..
No worries, I gotchu!
The Complete Picture
Here it is, every listing mapped against its price per perch vs Land size.
All the listings which are spread across Kiribathgoda..
This raw picture can be a bit confusing, you have listings with extreme values!
It is better to steer clear of these when you analyze as these could very well be anomaly in the data sets.
( If you are really interested to check these anomalous points, let us know, we will share the URLs!)
The ‘Refined’ Complete Picture
Now you have a better idea, more refined information at your disposal.
looking at this scatter, you can see:
Even though median is 650,000 per perch, there is a big variation and diversity in the Kiribathgoda Real Estate market, quite possibly due to the vast area it covers;
For Ex: 10P land, Price could range from: 500,000–800,000 per perch
( disregarding the lonely anamalous listings far away from median price range, as those could be either the most expensive lands or the bad lands sellers wanna get rid of!)
Which means if you are to buy.. you can get a chance to buy as low as 500,000 from 650,000.. around Kiribathgoda!
If you are to sell, you can push to sell at 800,000 rather than selling at the average price from the get go.. around Kiribathgoda!
Take Away; TLDR;
Before you think about buying a land, which usually means taking up a deal in millions, it is vital you do independant research and know the background: the lay of the land.
Knowing that you dont have 5-Man team to scout lands or 100 hours of phone call time, you need a tool which does that study for you and provide you with some basic understanding of the region, before you deep dive.
We aim to do that.
For now we shared you the Market Analysis on Kiribathgoda, in the next posts we will cover a bunch more!
The Boys Behind The Effort :
https://www.linkedin.com/in/praveen-jayakody/