Want a House in Chandigarh? The Govt Is Selling Flats: Starting at ₹1.3 Crore, on the City’s Edge
House in Chandigarh: The Chandigarh Housing Board’s e-auction 2026 lists a Sector 63 2BHK at a ₹1.29 crore reserve price — on the Mohali border. A look at the numbers behind Chandigarh’s dream-home price tag.
North Desk Correspondent
Chandigarh, August 6
When Badshah and Tanishk Bagchi wrote the “Dila ek Ghar Chandigarh Mein” track for the 2019 film Good Newwz — the one where the ultimate proof of love is a promise to buy the beloved a house in Chandigarh — they turned a very real regional obsession into a chartbuster. Across Punjab, Haryana, Himachal and the diaspora circuit from Southall to Surrey, “ghar Chandigarh mein” has functioned for decades as shorthand for having truly arrived.
The city’s planned sectors, green cover and civic order have made it, for two generations of NRI families in particular, the address of choice to retire to, invest in, or simply boast about at a wedding.
The Chandigarh Housing Board’s newest public notice is a useful reality check on what that dream now costs — and it isn’t dressed up with any romance at all.
House in Chandigarh: What’s actually on offer
House in Chandigarh: CHB has invited e-bids for 14 residential properties on a freehold basis, open to all Indian citizens as well as NRIs and OCIs above 18 years of age. The schedule is tight: earnest money deposits are being accepted from August 3 to August 12, with the e-auction itself running from August 14 to August 24. Bidding happens individually for each unit through the GeM portal, and — notably — GST does not apply on the built-up residential premium.
The list, though, is where the story is. Nine of the 14 units are older, smaller dwellings in Indira Colony, Manimajra, built in 1992, with covered areas around 550-560 sq ft. Their reserve prices range from roughly ₹41.5 lakh to ₹51 lakh — modest by Chandigarh standards, but for what is essentially a small flat in an older Manimajra pocket, still a serious ask.
Then the numbers start climbing. Two 1994-built units in Manimajra’s Category IV (one-bedroom) and Category I brackets (three-plus-one bedroom) carry reserve prices of about ₹1.06 crore and ₹2.65 crore respectively.
And then come the two units that anchor this story: a pair of 2016-built 2BHK flats (2BR category) in Sector 63, each with a covered area of 1,106 sq ft, carrying an identical reserve price of ₹1,29,43,827 — nearly ₹1.3 crore.
Mind you, that is the reserve, the floor bid, not the price a serious buyer would ultimately need to pay once the auction runs its course. And Sector 63 sits at Chandigarh’s southern edge, its boundary running directly along Mohali — not Sector 8, not Sector 18, not anywhere near the city’s celebrated Corbusier-era heart. And these are just leftover flats in a high-density area.
The list closes on an entirely different scale: a HIG plot in Sector 46-C, built in 1983, with a land area of 213.68 square yards, carrying a reserve price of ₹7,33,94,739 — over ₹7.3 crore, for a single independent unit.
A sector that has carried baggage before
House in Chandigarh: Sector 63 isn’t a neutral backdrop here. Its Self-Financing Housing Scheme has drawn regulatory attention in the past — CBI officials at one point questioned officials of CHB’s engineering department over how construction work and contractor allotment were handled on the project.
Separately, the sector’s location running parallel to Mohali has previously created boundary complications, with houses and infrastructure found to have come up on land whose UT-versus-Punjab ownership was disputed.
None of that erases the fact that Sector 63 flats were wildly oversubscribed when first launched — bids came in at more than 60 times the available units — which tells you the demand for a Chandigarh address has never really been the problem. What’s worth watching is whether prospective bidders today, especially NRI buyers relying on relatives or agents for due diligence, are aware of that history before they commit an EMD on a border-adjacent unit priced above a crore.
The auction isn’t landing easily elsewhere either
The CHB notice doesn’t exist in isolation. The Chandigarh Estate Office ran its own e-auction of residential freehold plots barely a month ago, and the results were telling. Of ten plots put up across sectors including 15-B, 20, 21, 23, 27-D, 30-A, 37-A and 44-B, only two actually sold; the remaining eight rolled over to the next cycle, as unsold government inventory routinely does in Chandigarh’s auction calendar.
Reserve prices for residential plots have reportedly risen by more than 100 per cent for comparable sizes since September 2025, even as buyer appetite for the less fashionable addresses cools.
The bigger picture
Put together, the numbers tell a story that cuts against the song’s easy romance. A basic 2BHK on the city’s edge, in a sector with a documented regulatory and boundary history, now carries a floor price approaching ₹1.3 crore — a figure that would have seemed absurd to the very people who queued up for Sector 63 flats when they first launched.
Meanwhile, the city’s own Estate Office is finding it can’t always give away plots in its less desirable pockets even at reduced expectations.
For many including NRI buyers chasing the “ghar Chandigarh mein” fantasy from thousands of miles away, the location within the city matters as much as the city’s name itself.
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