Gaurav Sehrawat
Director, Rana Infra · Profile
A buyer asked me last month why our floor on a 538 sq yd plot is 3,600 sq ft when the plot itself is around 4,840 sq ft. He was not being difficult. He was doing the arithmetic that most buyers now do, and he wanted to know where 1,240 sq ft had gone.
The honest answer is that it went where it always goes, and the number it produces — in our buildings, between 74 and 84 per cent of the plot — is one of the few genuinely useful ways to compare two builder floors before you have seen either of them.
Here is what actually eats the area.
Setbacks come first. A plot has to leave ground open on the sides, and how much depends on the plot’s width, its road, and the local rules that apply to it. On a narrow plot, the mandatory side setbacks can take a far larger share than on a wide one, because the setback is a fixed distance rather than a percentage. This is why two plots of the same area can produce very different floors.
Then the stilt and the parking. A floor that gives three covered bays on the ground needs the ground. That is not wasted area — it is the difference between a car that sits under cover in July and one that does not — but it is area that never becomes a room.
Then the structure. Columns, beams, the lift shaft, the staircase, the shafts that carry services from the basement to the terrace. On a single-floor-per-level building this is proportionally heavier than in an apartment tower, because you are not spreading the core across forty homes. You are carrying the whole core for one household.
Then the walls. A 4 BHK with five bathrooms and four balconies has an unusual number of wet areas and external openings for its size. Every bathroom is a set of walls and a shaft. Every balcony is a slab and a parapet. Both are necessary, both are costly in area terms, and both are part of what the buyer is actually purchasing.
What raises the number is planning discipline. A plan where the drawing and dining share one volume, where the utility is attached rather than separate, where the pooja space is carved into a corner rather than given a room, gets closer to 84 per cent. A plan with an extra corridor, a walk-in wardrobe, and a separate servant room gets closer to 74.
That is not a defect. It is a choice, and the buyer is entitled to know which choice was made.
Which is why the number worth asking for is not the built-up area. It is the approved plan. Built-up can be stated almost any way. The approved plan shows you the setbacks, the covered area, and how the floor actually sits on the plot — and it is the only document that tells you whether the 3,600 sq ft you were quoted is the same 3,600 sq ft a sanctioning authority agreed to.
If a developer will not show you that drawing before you pay a booking amount, the percentage is not the problem. The unwillingness is.
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Gaurav Sehrawat is a director at Rana Infra, building independent floors in Vasant Kunj, Vasant Enclave and Nangal Dewat since 2003. More about him.
