Primary data
Various primary data collected through field survey are:

Information regarding residential apartments for sale and sites for constructing residential apartments within Chennai City. This information was collected from a variety of sources such as Newspapers, Internet websites of the promoters, Telephonic interview with the sellers, Property Fair ’99 exhibition etc. The following are the information that were collected regarding residential apartments for sale within Chennai City:

• Name of the Agency promoting the Apartment, Contact Address, Web Site Address, Email Address, etc.
• Location and address of the Apartment for Sale
• Apartment Cost per Sq.ft
• Key Plan, Site Plan, Floor Plan and Photo of the Apartment
• Additional Information about the Apartment and the Agency such as the Special Features of the Apartment, Profile of the Agency, etc.

The information that was collected from the sellers of sites suitable for constructing residential apartments are:

• Name of the Seller
• Contact Address
• Site Area in Sqm
• Cost per Sqm
• Site Location and Address
• Brief Description about the Property
• Willingness of the Seller for Joint Venture
• Ground Water Availability (Depth in Feet ) and Drinking Suitability
• Whether the Property is with/ without Building, etc.

Weightage given for various factors by apartment promoters when selecting a site for constructing residential apartments through questionnaire survey with the promoters. The following are the factors for which the promoters were asked to assign weightage on a 10-point scale:

• Proximity of the Site to City Center
• Cost per Sqm of the Site
• Availability of Ground Water (Potability)
• Availability of Metro Water
• Availability of Sewerage System on the Abutting Road
• Site to be Free from Inundation
• Proximity of the Site to Educational Institution, Railway Station, Bus Terminus, Hospital etc

Secondary data
Various secondary data that were collected include Trend in Residential apartment prices (Rs/Sqft) for the past five years (1995-99) and Residential land prices (1 ground price Rs in lakhs) (1999-2000), at selected locations within Chennai City from the journal titled “A Guide to Chennai Real Estate 1999”.



Sampling for data collection
It needs no mention that the real estate sector in India is an unorganised one and it is a herculean task to collect information regarding the total number of apartment promoters operating in an area. This being the situation the scope of defining the sample space by using Stratified Sampling/Cluster Sampling technique gets defeated as these techniques require prior information about the promoters such as the number of years the promoter has been in this field, number of apartments promoted so far etc. to stratify the population. So the population has been defined by exhausting the list of promoters in the Yellow Pages of the Chennai Telephone Directory, Members of FAIRPRO (Foundation for Fair Practices in Property Development), List of Promoters who attended the Property Fair’99 exhibition held at Chennai, the list of promoters having website addresses. All these were merged and overlapping addresses eliminated and the final population arrived at. Random sampling has been done to select the sample from the population.

It is worth mentioning here that, eventhough attempts were made to collect information regarding the approval status of the sites and apartments for sale (i.e. the Development Control Rules (DCR) compliance), all efforts went in vain, as such information is possible to collect only for an authority like CMDA (Chennai Metropolitan Development Authority).

Data Analysis
“Method of Weights” is a very common method in urban analysis for calculating Composite Site Index (CSI), to identify the best site among the available alternative sites based on a set of factors, which are supposed to have an influence in the process of site selection. The method involves fixing of weightages to various factors involved in the calculation of CSI by Expert Opinion Survey/Delphi Technique/Questionnaire Survey. Then on the basis of the factors considered for calculating the CSI, the sites are ranked in comparison to one another. For a given factor the top most rank is assigned for the best site and the bottom most rank for the worst site. This is carried out for all the factors considered, for all the sites. Then for each individual site, the rank assigned for that site for a particular factor (say for e.g. Proximity to City Centre) is multiplied by the corresponding weightage for that factor as obtained from the Expert Opinion Survey/Delphi Technique/Questionnaire Survey, etc. The summation of these products for a particular site is nothing but the Composite Site Index (CSI) value for that site, based on the set of factors taken into consideration.