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Home truths hit hard as sales dip 14 percent in top 8 Indian cities
MUMBAI: Looks like the summer wasn’t just hot outside India’s housing market felt the burn too. India’s eight biggest housing markets hit a bit of a speed bump in Q2 2025, with home sales dropping 14 per cent year-on-year, according to the latest Real Insight Residential report by Proptiger.com. The slowdown is largely attributed to affordability concerns, which nudged many buyers into pause mode.
The dip was particularly sharp in Mumbai Metropolitan Region (MMR), down a hefty 32 per cent, and Pune, which saw a 27 per cent decline. But it wasn’t all doom and gloom cities like Bengaluru (+16 per cent), Chennai (+33 per cent), and Kolkata (+19 per cent) bucked the trend, showing that not every buyer had cold feet.
On a quarter-on-quarter basis, sales across the board stayed flat with 97,674 units sold, as per Proptiger, which is part of REA India (also the parent of Housing.com). MMR, Pune and Bengaluru collectively accounted for 59 per cent of the total quarterly sales.
“This short-term dip is more of a recalibration than a retreat,” said Proptiger.com head of sales Sridhar Srinivasan. “Yes, affordability is squeezing budget buyers, but demand is intact, and developers are clearly still bullish especially in the premium segment.”
Supply-side sentiment mirrored the demand softening, with new launches falling 10 per cent QoQ and 17 per cent YoY. Mumbai (-43 per cent), Pune (-39 per cent) and Bangalore (-2 per cent) all saw dips, while Chennai and Hyderabad posted impressive gains (+64 per cent and +69 per cent, respectively). Kolkata saw a 192 per cenrt surge—albeit from a very low base.
Interestingly, the report points out that geopolitical tensions (read: India-Pakistan skirmishes) also dented buyer sentiment during the April–June period, causing many to adopt a wait-and-watch stance.
| City | Sales YoY Change | Launches YoY Change |
|---|---|---|
| Mumbai | -32% | -43% |
| Pune | -27% | -39% |
| Bangalore | +16% | -2% |
| Chennai | +33% | +64% |
| Kolkata | +19% | +192% |
| NCR | -9% | +29% |
Despite the turbulence, Proptiger notes that the long-term market outlook remains upbeat, buoyed by solid macro fundamentals and continued developer interest, especially in premium and mid-income housing.
So while this quarter may be slower than usual, it seems the foundation of India’s housing story is far from shaky. Just a little pause before the next big push.
NATIONAL: Amazon Ads has laid out a sharply tech-led vision for the advertising industry in 2026, arguing that artificial intelligence, streaming TV and creator partnerships will combine to turn brand building into a more precise, performance-driven business.
At the heart of the shift, the company says, is the fusion of AI with Amazon’s vast trove of shopping, browsing and streaming signals, allowing advertisers to move beyond blunt reach metrics to campaigns designed around real customer behaviour.
“The future of advertising is not about reaching more people, but the right people with messages that resonate,” said Amazon Ads India head and vice president Girish Prabhu. “By combining AI with deep customer insights, we help brands move from broadcasting campaigns to having meaningful conversations wherever audiences spend their time.”
One of the biggest changes, according to Amazon Ads, will be the collapse of the wall between media planning and creative development. Retail media, powered by first-party data, is increasingly shaping everything from brand discovery to final purchase, pushing marketers to design campaigns around audience insight rather than internal instinct.
AI is also moving from a support tool to a creative engine. Agentic AI, which automates and accelerates production, is expected to make high-quality creative accessible even to small businesses, compressing weeks of work into hours and giving challengers the ability to compete with larger brands on speed and scale.
Behind the scenes, AI-driven analytics will take on a bigger role in campaign optimisation, identifying patterns, spotting opportunities and recommending actions that would previously have required teams of analysts.
Streaming TV is another big battleground. With India’s video streaming audience now above 600 million and connected TV users at 129.2 million in 2025, advertisers are set to treat streaming not just as a branding channel but as a performance engine, measured increasingly by sales, sign-ups and bookings rather than just reach.
Finally, Amazon Ads sees creators and contextual advertising reshaping how brands tell stories. Creators will act less like influencers and more like long-term partners, while scene-aware ads on streaming platforms will allow brands to insert hyper-relevant offers into the flow of what viewers are watching.
Taken together, Amazon Ads argues, these shifts mark a move towards advertising that is both more human and more measurable, where AI handles the complexity, and creativity does the persuading.
