Ground floor or top floor: pick your problem
Both ends of the building come a little cheaper than the middle. The discount is never a gift.
In a Bangalore apartment block, the floor you pick is not really about the view. Ground and top both usually come a little cheaper than the middle floors, and that discount is payment for a problem. The only question is which problem fits your life.
The ground floor is the easy yes. No lift, no stairs during a power cut, an easy move-in, sometimes a patch of garden. It is also first in line for everything you did not order: it is where a cloudburst goes when the storm drain gives up, it collects the mosquitoes and the damp, and it hears every scooter that enters the gate.
The top floor is the romantic yes. Light on two sides, moving air, distance from the gate noise. Then summer arrives, the sun spends all afternoon on the slab above your bed, and the bedroom holds that heat past midnight. Water pressure is weakest at the top of the stack. And every one of those stairs is still there when the lift is not working.
Check for the problem you are buying
- Ground: look for old waterlines on the compound walls, ask the watchman where the road floods, and smell the bathroom corners for long-standing damp.
- Top: put your hand flat on the bedroom ceiling on a hot afternoon, run the shower at full, and ask how often the lift is down and for how long.
A middle floor sidesteps most of this, which is exactly why it costs a little more. If the budget pushes you to an edge, fine. Just choose the edge on purpose, and check for its problem before you sign, not after.