Why 70% of a home's value sits inside the gate
PropEnabler.AI · 26 October 2026
Most property advice starts outside the gate: the metro, the schools, the commute. In a good gated society, residents spend most of their day inside it, so that is where we start.
The 70/30 idea
Walk through a well-run Bengaluru society on a weekday evening. Children are in the play area, someone is swimming laps, a group is playing badminton, parents are walking the internal loop. Very few of them will leave the gate before the next morning's commute.
At Octopus Estates we see the same pattern with our clients. In a society with good amenities, residents spend roughly 70% of their time inside the gate and 30% outside it: the office, the school run, the weekend errand. That split is our working estimate from client conversations, not yet a measured number, and we explain at the end how we plan to test it.
If it holds, it changes how a home should be judged. The usual checklist (distance to metro, nearby schools, the mall down the road) describes the 30%. The 70% depends on what the builder put inside the compound, and on how many people share it.
What buyers are really paying for
Two things sit behind the 70%, and neither shows up on a locality map.
Privacy. A gate, a guard and a known set of neighbours mean children can cycle unsupervised and older parents can walk at night. Fewer homes per lift and per tower mean fewer strangers in the corridor. Buyers pay for this quietly; few of them name it, but it is often why a family picks one project over a cheaper one next door.
The infrastructure inside. In much of Bengaluru the society, not the city, keeps daily life running:
- Power backup, so work from home survives an outage
- Water, from the society's own storage, borewells or treatment, and a sewage treatment plant that keeps it legal
- Security and CCTV at the gate and across the grounds
- The clubhouse, pool, gym and courts, which replace a club membership and a daily drive
- Open space and gardens, which in a dense city are often the only green a resident walks on
When these work, residents have little reason to leave. When they fail, no metro station nearby makes up for it.
How we score a society
We give every project two scores out of 10: one for what is inside the gate and one for the neighbourhood around it. The overall prop score weights them 70/30, the same split as residents' time:
The society score is a weighted sum of six factors, each scaled from 0 to 1:
| Factor | What we measure | Full marks | Zero | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A: Amenities | Weighted checklist of 19 items; clubhouse, pool, gym, kids' play, gardens, courts and security count most | All 19 present | None listed | 30% |
| D: Density | Homes per acre of the project's land | 25 or fewer | 150 or more | 20% |
| O: Open space | Share of the land left open | 75% or more | 30% or less | 15% |
| C: Clubhouse | Clubhouse floor area per home | 40 sq ft or more | No clubhouse | 15% |
| P: Pool | A pool, scaled by water area per home where known | Pool, generous size | No pool | 10% |
| V: Privacy and security | Gated entry, CCTV, homes per lift and per floor | Gated, CCTV, 4 or fewer homes per floor | Open compound | 10% |
The thresholds are starting points, set so that the projects we know well land where an experienced realtor would put them. We will tune them as we collect more data.
Today the live map scores factor A only, from each project's published amenity list. Clubhouse area, open space and pool size are rarely published, and homes-per-acre needs both the unit count and the land area. We are collecting these project by project, and the score will move to the full formula as they arrive.
Density: the factor brochures leave out
Two projects can list the same pool, gym and clubhouse and offer very different lives. The difference is how many people share them.
Take the numbers on the projects' own pages. Purva Northern Lights lists 2,973 homes on about 24.6 acres: roughly 121 homes per acre. Assetz Sora & Saki lists 1,296 homes on about 11.3 acres: roughly 115 per acre. A villa community at 10 to 20 homes per acre shares its pool among a small fraction of that number of families.
On our density factor, 121 homes per acre scores about 0.23 out of 1, and a 20-per-acre villa layout scores 1. Same amenity list, very different queue at the pool on a Sunday morning.
Density also drives privacy (how many strangers share your lift and lobby), wear on the shared infrastructure, and the monthly maintenance each family pays. That is why it carries 20% of the society score, second only to the amenities themselves.
One caution: unit counts and acreage on listing sites sometimes cover a whole multi-phase township rather than the phase you are buying in. We check the phase before trusting the number.
The 30% that still matters
A great society in the wrong place is still the wrong place. The 30% covers the trips no clubhouse can replace: the commute, the school run, the hospital visit, the weekly shop.
Our neighbourhood score averages 19 measures within 2 km of each project, each half how many there are and half how close the nearest one is:
- Daily needs: supermarkets, restaurants, pharmacies, banks, malls
- Schools and colleges; hospitals and clinics
- Metro stations, bus stops and distance to the major job hubs
- Parks, gyms and places of worship
- Government services (post office, police, fire station, civic offices) and everyday services (laundry, salons, vets, EV charging)
The data comes from OpenStreetMap and is refreshed with each build. On our map of about 250 Bengaluru projects, central areas such as Koramangala score above 9 on the neighbourhood alone, while some fast-growing outer corridors sit near 5. That is exactly where a strong society earns its 70%: it can make an outer location livable.
What this means for buyers and realtors
For buyers: visit on a weekday evening and a Sunday morning, not only on a site-visit Saturday. Count people at the pool and the play area, ask how many homes share each lift, and ask the residents' association how often the backup and water fail. These answers describe the 70% of your time a brochure skips.
For realtors: lead with the society, then the location. A client choosing between two projects at similar prices usually hears about metro distance and appreciation. Show them the society score next to the neighbourhood score, and the trade-off becomes concrete: a denser, better-located tower against a quieter, better-equipped compound further out.
What we still have to prove. Three things, in order:
- The 70/30 split itself. It comes from what our clients tell us. We plan to ask residents of the projects on our map how their week divides, and adjust the weight if the answer is different.
- Complete amenity lists. Listing sites publish amenities unevenly; some show only the top 15 to 20 items. Today that makes part of each society score depend on which site we read. We will confirm checklists on site for every project we shortlist.
- The missing measurements. Clubhouse area, open space and pool size, so the full formula above replaces today's checklist.
Until then, read a society score as a strong signal to investigate, not a final verdict. Every score on our map shows where its data came from, so you can check it yourself.