v3.0 — 2026-04-28
Headline: Apartment formula extended from 9 to 11 axes. Plot formula extended from 9 to 11 axes. Climate & environmental risk, liveability/build quality, investor yield, plot conversion status and plot utility/build-ready status formalised as scored inputs. Five new apartment hard caps and five new plot hard caps.
What changed — apartments
- Added Liveability & Build Quality (6%) — density, parking ratio, water source (Cauvery/BWSSB vs borewell), STP commissioning, power backup, fire systems beyond NOC, branded-spec audit, balcony depth and ventilation. v2 buried these inside Governance and Construction.
- Added Investment Yield & Exit Liquidity (5%) — gross and net rental yield, days-on-market, tenant-pool depth, holding cost (CAM + property tax), 12-month vacancy survey. v2 had no investor-facing axis.
- Reweighted Location → Location, Infrastructure & Climate Risk (12% → 14%). Absorbs CWC flood-hazard zone, CPCB 5-yr AQI trend, BIS seismic zone and MoEFCC industrial-cluster proximity as scored sub-points. Chennai 2015/2023, Bangalore 2022 outer-ring and Delhi-NCR AQI exceedance forced this.
- Reweighted Value & Price Trajectory (10% → 9%) and added a forward-supply sub-point: RERA-registered new launches within 2 km / 24 months indexed against absorption.
- Trimmed Legal & Title 18→16, RERA 12→10, Builder Health 14→12, Sentiment 10→8, Bank Depth 8→6, Construction 10→9, Governance 6→5 — to make headroom for the two new axes without inflating any single one.
- Added five hard caps — CWC Category-A flood with no mitigation (≤ 5.4), no commissioned STP at OC on >50-unit projects (≤ 5.9), parking ratio < 1.0 in Premium+ (≤ 6.4), borewell-only water in Cauvery/Krishna Stage-V deficit zones (≤ 6.4), CPCB 5-yr AQI > 200 within 2 km (≤ 6.9).
What changed — plots
- Added Conversion & Zoning Lock (6%) — DC conversion order, agri-to-NA gazette, master-plan zoning lock, FAR-amendment history. A plot without conversion cannot be financed, registered residential or insured. v2 mentioned this in sources but did not score it.
- Added Utility & Build-Ready Status (6%) — metered water within 500 m, BESCOM/equivalent load sanction, sewage trunk distance, soil bearing capacity (IS 1888). The four questions every villa-builder asks before pouring foundation.
- Reweighted Future Approval Risk → Future Approval & Climate Risk (10% same), absorbing CWC flood maps, IS-1893 seismic zoning, Geological Survey of India soil-bearing maps and Cartosat slope DEM as scored sub-points.
- Trimmed Title 22→20, Layout Approval 18→16, Access 12→11, Builder 10→9, Location 9, Amenity 6→5, Value 8→6, RERA 4→2.
- Added five plot hard caps — DC conversion not done (≤ 4.4), soil bearing < 100 kN/m² unmitigated (≤ 5.4), no metered water within 500 m (≤ 5.9), BESCOM connection unavailable post-handover (≤ 5.9), CWC Category-A flood with no engineered drainage (≤ 5.4).
Why
v2 ran for the back half of 2026 across the 1,721-project corpus. A second-pass review of buyer-survey data, broker call logs and investor due-diligence checklists across Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Gurgaon and Mumbai surfaced three persistent gaps. Climate and environmental risk had moved from a tail concern to a deal-breaker — Chennai's 2015 and 2023 floods, Bangalore's 2022 outer-ring inundation, and Delhi-NCR's chronic AQI exceedance now show up at the top of buyer site-visit questionnaires. Liveability and build quality (parking, water source, STP, power, fire systems) consistently ranked in the top three drivers in our own owner-occupier surveys but were buried in Governance and Construction. Investment yield — rental yield, days-on-market, holding cost, tenant-pool depth — was the entire spreadsheet investors were running, and v2 ignored all four numbers. Plot-side, conversion status and utility/build-ready status were the two reasons the most expensive plot purchases turned dead — the buyer could not finance, register, insure, or ever build.
Affected projects
All apartment and plot reviews in the Brickplot universe will be re-scored under v3 as their next editorial review cycle comes up. Project pages built before 2026-04-28 continue to display nine v2 axes until their re-score. Pages whose v3 score moves more than one point from v2 will be surfaced on the Avoid List and Wait List with the delta annotated, the same convention as v1→v2.