Building comparables

Valuation is an argument

मूल्यांकन एक तर्क है

There is no formula that turns a parcel into a number. What there is instead is a method: gather evidence of what similar land actually changed hands for, normalise it so the numbers are comparable, adjust for the ways your parcel differs, and state the result as a range with your reasoning attached.

Done properly this is defensible. A client can see how you got there and can push back on a specific adjustment rather than on the number. Done improperly — a figure from the air, or a rate lifted from a neighbouring village — it collapses the moment anyone asks a question.

What makes a genuine comparable

असली तुलना किसे कहें

Not every transaction you hear about is evidence. A comparable should be:

• Actual. A completed, registered transaction — not an asking price, not a rumour, not a deal that fell through. Asking prices tell you what sellers hope for; they are the weakest form of evidence and the most abundant.
• Recent. How recent depends on how fast the local market is moving. In a quiet rural belt, two years may be fine. Near an active corridor, six months may already be stale.
• Nearby. Same village where possible, adjoining village at a push. Land value is intensely local — the same class of land two villages away can trade quite differently.
• Similar in kind. Agricultural compared with agricultural, converted with converted, plotted with plotted. Comparing across categories without adjustment is meaningless.
• Arm's length. A transfer between family members, a distress sale, or a purchase by an adjoining owner who needed that specific strip are all real transactions and all poor comparables.

Normalise before you compare

तुलना से पहले एक इकाई पर लाएँ

Level 1, Lesson 4 covered why. Quotes will arrive in pucca bighas, kaccha bighas, hectares from the record, and square feet near a town. Nothing can be compared until it is in one unit.

The sequence, every time:

1. Take the area from the record, not from the description.
2. Convert to a single working unit — square feet works well because it also serves near-urban parcels.
3. Subtract the non-usable and non-transferable portions — recorded rasta, drain, pond, another holder's share.
4. Divide the transaction price by the usable, transferable area.
5. Do this for every comparable, on the same basis.

Only now do you have a set of numbers that mean the same thing.

The adjustment factors

समायोजन के कारक

Your parcel is not identical to any comparable. These are the differences that actually move value, roughly in order of how much they typically matter:

A worked comparison

एक उदाहरण

Prices below are shown as index points rather than currency, because the method is the lesson and we publish no land values. All parcels are fictional.

When the evidence is too thin

जब सबूत कम हों

Sometimes there are no genuine comparables — a thin market, an unusual parcel, or a village where nothing has changed hands in years. The professional answer is to say so.

• Widen the search carefully, and state that you have — adjoining villages, longer period.
• Give a wider range and say why it is wide.
• Identify what evidence would narrow it, and what it would cost to get.
• Never manufacture confidence you do not have. A client who is told the range is uncertain can decide how to proceed; a client given a false precision cannot.