Plot or floor in South Delhi? And why your share of the land is the number nobody tells you

Updated 1 November 2026 · Ashutosh Bhogra

In South Delhi, with about ₹30 crore, you can buy a 300 sq yd plot with an old house on it, or a large floor — say one floor of a new building on an 800 sq yd plot. The question people ask is which is the better buy. The question they should ask is: what do I actually own, and what does it cost to own it?

A plot: you own the land

Buy a 300 sq yd plot in Greater Kailash, Hauz Khas, Safdarjung Enclave or Green Park and you own all of it. In 2026 that is about ₹29 to 31 crore. Stamp duty, registration and fees add ₹2 to 3 crore.

Then you decide. Live in the old house. Build. Or do a collaboration: a builder builds at his cost, keeps some floors, and you keep the rest.

If you build yourself, the whole building — basement, stilt, ground, first, second, third and terrace — costs ₹7 to 8 crore. That is a cost base of around ₹39 to 41 crore for four homes. Approvals in South Delhi usually take one to three months, five at the outside; the long waits you hear about are almost always a new rule the authorities have not yet learned to apply. The building takes 24 to 36 months from signing to handover.

Before you buy a plot, your lawyer checks: freehold or leasehold; the chain of deeds; whether the old house was built on a sanctioned plan; any family claim; and the boundary against the plan. A plot with a dispute on one side is a plot you cannot build on.

A floor: you own a slice of the land, and that slice has a size

Buy a first floor in the same building and you own that floor, plus a share of the land under it. The land share is written in the deed as a percentage, or it should be.

The floors of one building do not sell for the same money. In South Delhi the ladder is:

• basement with ground floor: 1.3 times the first floor
• first floor: 1
• second floor: 1
• third floor with terrace: 1.2 times the first floor

So if a first floor on that 300 sq yd plot is ₹10 crore, the basement-and-ground is ₹13 crore and the top floor with terrace is ₹12 crore. Four units, ₹45 crore and more, from a plot that cost around ₹40 crore to buy and build. That difference is the builder's margin, and it is why there are builders.

Before you buy a floor, your lawyer checks: the land share in your deed; the collaboration agreement between the plot owner and the builder, because your floor exists under it; the sanctioned plan, and whether what was built matches it; the parking slot, by number; who owns the terrace and the stilt; and the lift. Builder floors in South Delhi are freehold; nobody sells a leasehold floor here, so that question does not arise.

The land share problem

Here is the part that matters. Many South Delhi houses were split by floors years ago, inside a family, with a deed that says "the ground floor to A, the first floor to B" and nothing about the land. When one of those floors comes up for sale, the buyer's lawyer asks: what share of the land comes with it? If the deed is silent, nobody knows.

That is a title that is not 100 per cent, and banks will not lend against it. It can be fixed, but fixing it means new documents, signed by every owner in the building and registered. If one of them lives abroad or is not on speaking terms with the others, it takes months. The price of the floor moves with that.

Why it matters more than it used to: the land is where the value is. A floor on a 300 sq yd plot in a good colony is worth what it is worth because of the ground under it, not the tiles on it. When the building is rebuilt in twenty years, your land share is what you bring to the table. A floor with no land share written is a floor with no seat at that table.

Before you buy any floor, read the land share in the deed. If it is not there, that is your first question to the seller, not your last.

So which?

The same money buys two very different things.

A 300 sq yd plot buys you land, and with it time and control: you decide what is built and when. But you carry the money for two to three years while it is built, you deal with approvals and a builder, and what you live in at the end is a floor of about 2,400 sq ft on a plot of that size.

A floor on an 800 sq yd plot buys you a home of 4,000 sq ft and more, plus balconies, all on one level. It usually sits on a wider road, in a part of the colony with fewer houses to the acre, with driveways on both sides. There are more of them on the market at any time, so they are easier to find; many are ready to move into or close to it; and the building part is somebody else's worry, finished. What you give up is the land: you own a share of it, not all of it, and that share has to be written in the deed.

Neither is better. A family that wants to live well now, on one floor, with the car in the drive, is usually better off with the large floor. A family that wants the land, and has the time and the appetite for a build, buys the plot. It is usually clear within one conversation.

Plots and floors across South Delhi. See a current home, or read how a collaboration works.