Published: May 2026 | White Warp | whitewarp.in
A typical Delhi NCR feasibility report from a brand-name consultancy reads beautifully — charts, ranges, an executive summary, a logo on every page. What it almost never contains is a citation. Where did the ₹6,800/sqft selling rate come from? Which quarter? Whose database? Which formula converts that into IRR?
We just shipped a feasibility report with 8 numbered footnotes on the cover page, a 7-appendix methodology trail (A through G), and a SHA-256 fingerprint of the engine that produced it. Every figure is either citable to a public source with an as-of date, or labelled "modeled" with the assumption made explicit.
This post explains why. It is also, frankly, a stake in the ground: this is how Indian real-estate intelligence should work.
The Credibility Crisis in Indian RE Feasibility
The Indian real-estate market is roughly $60T in total stock and adds another $1T+ of new development each cycle. The intelligence layer above that market — feasibility studies, valuations, market reports — sits with a handful of firms: ANAROCK, Knight Frank, JLL, CBRE, Colliers, plus the Big Four advisory arms.
These firms publish quarterly PDFs that the industry quotes endlessly. Pulse, India Real Estate, Marketbeat, Residential Outlook. Strong brands, smart analysts, useful trend data. But try to verify a single number in any of them. Open ANAROCK Pulse Q1 2026, find a launch-price index, then try to reconstruct the basket of projects it tracks. You can't. The methodology page reads "our proprietary database of 5,000+ projects" and stops.
This is not a moral failing of those firms — proprietary databases are how they monetise. But it has a consequence: buyers can't verify, sellers can't be challenged, and regulators can't audit. The IBBI Registered Valuer regime is the only formal check, and it operates well below the feasibility layer.
The 2008 GFC happened in a market where every mortgage was rated. Our market doesn't even rate the rates.
What "Open Methodology" Actually Means
We make three concrete commitments on every report:
1. Every figure traces to a public source with an as-of date. If a number is sourced, the footnote names the publisher, the document, the page, and the day the data was pulled. If a number is modeled, it lives in Appendix B with the formula and the assumption tier (live / cached / emergency-fallback).
2. The engine SHA is stamped on the cover. Every PDF carries a methodology fingerprint — a SHA-256 hash of the engine version that produced it. If we change a formula tomorrow, your report from yesterday is still reproducible byte-for-byte. The hash also makes our errata log auditable: if a number changed, you can see when and why.
3. The code goes public. When the GitHub org is live (we are aiming this quarter), the engine repository will be Apache-2.0 licensed. That includes the Monte Carlo loop, the jurisdiction rules, the cashflow curves, and the data-source adapters. The data-source outputs will stay behind the report — but the calculations on top of them will not.
These three together are what we mean by "proof-of-process". You do not have to trust us. You can audit us.
The 24-Source Register
The engine pulls from 24 distinct public sources today, grouped into 8 categories. None of them are proprietary; all of them are free.
Government rates (4 sources) — RBI repo rate and WALR series for the discount rate, CBDT Cost Inflation Index for LTCG, CBIC GST schedule for construction tax treatment. These flow directly into WACC and post-tax IRR.
State circle rates (4 sources) — IGRS portals for Delhi, UP, Haryana, and Tamil Nadu. Circle rates set the stamp-duty floor and the tax base. We scrape per-locality and cache with as-of dates; if the IGRS portal is older than 90 days, the report carries a "stale" badge.
Quarterly industry (4 sources) — NHB Residex (the only price index built from government registration data), ANAROCK Pulse, Knight Frank, JLL India. We do not republish their PDFs; we cite the headline figure and link out.
Construction cost (8 sources) — TN PWD Schedule of Rates 2025-26 (the most granular public construction-rate document in India), plus 7 commodity scrapers (SAIL TMT steel is live; cement, copper, aluminium, glass, sand, plywood, and tile feeds are queued). These feed our per-trade decomposition: instead of "construction cost ₹2,000/sqft", you get a CSI-aligned breakdown by trade.
Market context (4 sources) — Yahoo Finance for listed developer stocks (proxy for buyer credit conditions), Brent and USD/INR (input-cost FX risk), US Fed Funds (capital flow signal), gold and China PMI (cement and steel demand signals). These do not change a feasibility verdict by themselves — they widen or narrow the confidence band.
For every source we publish a confidence tier: live (refreshed in the last 24h), cached (last 30 days), or emergency_fallback (the engine fell back to a hardcoded baseline because the live fetch failed). The PDF surfaces this honestly. We would rather show "emergency_fallback: NHB Residex Q3 2025" than fake freshness.
Why This Doesn't Compete with Big Four — And Isn't Supposed To
We are not trying to replace McKinsey, JLL, or KPMG. They are selling a different product, and sophisticated buyers know it.
What a Big Four feasibility study delivers, beyond the numbers, is liability transfer and brand cover. If the deal blows up, the institutional buyer can point to a McKinsey-branded PDF in the board pack. That has real economic value — it is reputational insurance — and we cannot replicate it. We do not have the partner network, the indemnity insurance, or the 80-year brand.
What we sell is proof-of-process. Reproducible numbers, public methodology, fingerprinted reports. A sophisticated buyer of a ₹50 Cr plot probably wants both: a Big Four cover note for the board, and a White Warp report in the appendix to actually pressure-test the assumptions. Different product, different price point, complementary use.
We give architects, plot buyers, and developers their time back — not their judgement, not their relationships. Eight hours of feasibility math you no longer have to do, with every step shown.
What's Next
Three things on the next-quarter list, honestly stated:
Back-test against 13 completed NCR projects. We have gathered the cohort (10 projects from SEBI RHPs, plus 3 from public IGRS sale records). Construction timeline and selling-rate predictions look directionally right. IRR error bands require more data before we will publish a number we are willing to defend.
6-month commodity factor regression. The factor model v0 ships with hand-picked driver loadings. Six months of weekly SAIL / cement / sand prices will let us replace those with regressed coefficients per typology.
IBBI Registered Valuer attestation. Engine output is not a regulated valuation today. We are working with an IBBI RV to issue parallel-signed reports for clients who need that layer.
We will be wrong about things. The errata log is where corrections live, and it is public on purpose.
If you want to see what a fully cited feasibility report looks like, you can generate one here. Read the appendices. Disagree with the assumptions. That is the whole point.
Methodology spec: whitewarp.in/methodology — Errata log: whitewarp.in/errata