Redevelopment feasibility: the numbers that decide a bid

Every redevelopment bid is a public claim that four numbers reconcile. Most never wrote the numbers down. Developers bleed on schemes won with adjectives, and societies suffer worse, mid-scheme renegotiations from inside transit housing, because the winning bid was arithmetic fiction. This is the four-line feasibility both sides should run before any MOU.

Line one: the entitlement#

What the parcel may build: base plus incentives under the applicable regime, Regulation 33's schemes in Mumbai, UDCPR's provisions elsewhere, with the self-redevelopment GR's 10 percent where it applies, computed on the plot's verified facts: road width, congested status, cess classification, cut-off dates. The feasibility habit that prevents the worst outcomes is boring: entitlement from the development plan's documents, not the broker's memory, and a sensitivity line for the premium costs that ride the reckoner.

Line two: the rehab burden#

The free build: existing members' area at the scheme's rehab norms plus whatever the negotiation added, corpus per member, shifting costs, and the census that multiplies everything. Census accuracy is the line's whole risk: members added, tenancies discovered and heirs surfacing after the pro forma froze each arrive bearing a flat you must build free. Count twice, legally, before bidding once.

How big is that line, typically? Bigger than most people outside the business expect, and the register can say so, because 3,174 published projects itemise their rehab units in the filed unit-level table.

The median redevelopment builds 48 percent of its units for nothing, and 1,342 of the 3,174, about two in five, build more than half. The tail matters more than the median for a bidder: at the 90th percentile the scheme gives away 69 percent of its units and the whole return sits in the remaining 31, which is a project with no tolerance for a census surprise or a slipped quarter. Scheme sizes are modest, a median of 22 rehab units and 71 at the 90th percentile, so this is mostly a business of many small obligations rather than a few large ones, and it concentrates hard: 1,629 of the 3,174 are in Mumbai Suburban, with Thane at 544 and Pune at 367.

Read those percentages as the shape of the business rather than as a benchmark for your parcel. A scheme's rehab share is set by how many members were there and what the code owes them, so it is an input to your bid and not a number to aim at.

Line three: the obligations ledger#

Redevelopment's distinctive physics: transit rent for every member, every month, from demolition to possession, plus construction finance, both recurring regardless of progress. Price them as a monthly burn multiplied by an honest schedule, then stress the schedule, because extensions that merely embarrass a greenfield project bankrupt a redevelopment: the ledger keeps charging while the register broadcasts the delay. A scheme carrying 80 members at Mumbai transit rents burns a mid-size flat's value every few months of slippage; that sentence belongs, in numbers, in every bid.

Line four: realisations#

What the sale component actually fetches: pricing anchored to the micro-market's filed evidence and velocity taken from the register's absorption data, the same quarterly series competitors publish under penalty. The redevelopment-specific discipline is sequencing realism: sale collections cannot lawfully sprint ahead of the whole scheme's obligations, and a lender funding the scheme will ask how the two components are sequenced whether or not anyone else can see it.

Note what the register does NOT expose here, because it is easy to assume the opposite from the buyer-side advice in circulation. The rehab-versus-sale progress split that buyers are told to read is legible on about 195 projects in the entire state, since it needs the filing to itemise rehab units, split them across buildings and carry progress on both. So your sequencing is, in practice, disclosed to your lender and to nobody else. That is not a reason to sequence badly; it is a reason not to assume the market is pricing your discipline, and a reason the society across the table will judge it from the site rather than the portal.

An analogy: the restaurant that must feed the staff first#

A greenfield project is a restaurant that opens, serves paying customers and counts the till. A redevelopment is a restaurant contractually obliged to feed forty staff, free, every service, before a paying customer is seated, having borrowed the money for the kitchen.

Three things follow, and each restates a line above. The free covers are the largest single item on the bill, at a median 48 percent of everything the kitchen produces. Feeding the staff late does not reduce the cost, it increases it, because the rent runs either way. And a bid that assumes forty staff when the roll says forty-six has not made a small error; it has priced the whole evening wrong. Nobody in this business is bidding for a restaurant. Several are bidding as though they were.

Anita Rao's discipline (illustrative, as ever) after one bruising Mumbai scheme: her firm bids redevelopments at the number that survives a four-quarter slippage stress, and loses most beauty parades to whoever bid the dream. Two of those dream bids have since returned to the same societies as renegotiations, and one society, wiser, reopened the file with her firm's original arithmetic. Losing on honest numbers, it turns out, is a marketing strategy with a lag.

Which lines the register can price, and which it cannot#

Worth being exact, because two of the four are public and two are not.

Line one is public but not on RERA. Entitlement comes from the development plan and the applicable code, which is a planning-authority document rather than a filing. The register tells you what neighbouring parcels actually built, which is a useful sanity check on an entitlement claim and not a substitute for reading the plan.

Line two is partly public. 3,174 schemes have declared their rehab burden, so the distribution above is real, but your own parcel's census is yours and no filing carries it.

Line three is not public at all. MahaRERA files no transit rent, no corpus and no finance cost. What it does file is the thing that drives them: every extension sought, with the promoter's own stated reason, across every scheme in the district. That is the empirical base for the schedule stress in line three, and it is free.

Line four is the one the register is actually built for. Filed supply, absorption and the district's slip distribution are exactly what a realisations line needs.

So the free half is line four plus the schedule evidence behind line three, and both sit on the district pages and the project pages for any covered market. The Rs 2,999 project analysis assembles them around one parcel: the catchment's absorption cross-section, the district's slip and filing-gap distributions, the vintage table for the pincode, and the operator concurrency timeline, which is the line-three input most bids omit because a developer already carrying five live obligations schedules a sixth optimistically. For societies reading a bid rather than writing one, the same report reads the bidding developer's delivery and dispute record, the counterparty file societies too rarely build.

The one-line summary#

Entitlement verified, rehab censused against a median that takes 48 percent of the units, obligations priced against stressed time, realisations taken from the filed market: the bid is the residual, and any bid that cannot show its four lines is a renegotiation wearing a garland.

Methodology and sources#

• Rehab burden distribution, scheme sizes and district concentration: ReraGenie analysis of 55,885 published MahaRERA projects, as updated on 17 September 2026, over the 3,174 that declare non-zero rehab units in the filed unit-level sales table against a filed unit total. Aggregate 110,484 rehab units of 256,219.
• The 195-project figure for a readable rehab-versus-sale progress split: same corpus, counting projects whose sales table names both a rehab-bearing and a rehab-free building or wing, each matching a building in the construction table with a filed completion percentage.
• Regulation 33 entitlements: Development Control and Promotion Regulations 2034 for Greater Mumbai. Entitlements elsewhere in the state: the Unified Development Control and Promotion Regulations. The additional 10 percent for qualifying self-redevelopment: Government of Maharashtra Housing Department Government Resolution dated 13 September 2019.
• Extension mechanics behind the schedule stress: Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016, section 7 and the Maharashtra rules made under it.
• MahaRERA files no transit rent, corpus, finance cost, land price or sale price, so every rupee figure in a feasibility is yours to source. Nothing here is a benchmark to bid against.