The Central Bank of Sri Lanka publishes two property price series for Colombo District. One is for land. One is for condominiums. They are often quoted in the same breath, and their most recent readings sit far enough apart to invite a comparison neither series will support.
Take land first. The Central Bank’s Land Valuation Indicator put Colombo District 10.6% ahead in the six months to December 2025, weighed against the same six months of 2024. Now condominiums: in the Condominium Market Survey, the new condominium price index for that identical district came in 18.5% above its level a year before, for the first quarter of 2026.
Subtracting one from the other produces a number. It does not produce a fact. These are different instruments, aimed at different assets, over different periods, on different clocks.
Two instruments, two clocks
| Land | Condominiums | |
|---|---|---|
| Published as | Land Price Index; Land Valuation Indicator | Condominium Market Survey |
| Geographic coverage | Colombo District | Colombo District |
| Frequency | Twice a year | Quarterly |
| Running since | 1998 | 2017 Q3 |
| Move quoted here | Up 10.6% | Up 18.5% |
| Period that move covers | H2 2025 against H2 2024 | 2026 Q1, year on year |
| That period closed | End of December 2025 | End of March 2026 |
Two rows in that table matter more than the percentages do.
The frequencies differ. A half-yearly series and a quarterly one have no common unit of time, so calling one of them faster than the other compares two shapes rather than two speeds.
The periods differ as well. The land reading closes at the end of December 2025. The condominium reading closes at the end of March 2026. Three months separate them, and in property three months is not nothing.
What each series is actually of
The condominium index is a new condominium index. It follows the prices of newly completed units, and those arrive in a development, in batches, at a price the developer has set. Developments finish in lumps rather than in a smooth flow, so a quarter in which two well-located towers hand over poses a different measurement problem from a quarter in which none do.
The land series is a valuation indicator for land in the district. Land does not arrive in batches. There is no launch price, no promotional first phase, no fit-out specification to argue over and no service charge attached to it.
That difference on its own is enough to expect two lines that behave differently, without either of them being wrong.
Supply is the structural difference
The clearest reason the two markets diverge is not a statistic. It is arithmetic about what can be added.
A developer can add condominium units to Colombo District without adding a square metre of Colombo District. A twenty-storey building puts many saleable homes on a single plot. When demand rises, that kind of supply can respond, slowly, expensively and subject to approvals, but it can respond.
Land cannot. The quantity of it in the district is fixed. Whatever pressure arrives has nowhere to go except into the price, or into a decision not to buy at all.
This is a way of reading the two series rather than a published finding, and it is not a forecast of either. It does explain why anyone expecting the two lines to track each other is expecting something the underlying assets do not have to deliver.
They are not even quoted in the same units
The two markets do not share a vocabulary of measurement, and that is its own quiet source of confusion.
Land here is quoted per perch. Apartments are quoted per square foot, and the floor area on a condominium plan appears in square feet or square metres.
| Unit | Equals |
|---|---|
| 1 perch | 272.25 sq ft, or 25.2929 m² |
| 1 rood | 40 perches |
| 1 acre | 160 perches, or 4,046.86 m² |
| 1 hectare | about 395.4 perches, or 10,000 m² |
Worth saying plainly. The official units are metric, square metres and hectares, while perches, roods and acres are what deeds, listings and buyers keep using. Both notations turn up on documents, and errors breed at the point where one gets turned into the other.
Converting a per-perch price into a per-square-foot one is not the error anybody makes. Treating percentage movements in the two markets as directly comparable is.
Which figure applies to a house
Neither cleanly, which is the honest answer and rarely the one people want.
A house is land plus a structure. The land underneath it belongs to the market the land indicator describes. The building on top of it belongs to no published Colombo series at all: what it is worth turns on age, construction, layout, condition and specification, and those are property-by-property questions rather than district ones.
Extent is a legal question rather than a statistical one, too. Older deeds carrying a “more or less” extent clause are widely reported by conveyancing practitioners to be unreliable on the point. Where such a deed and a current survey plan disagree about how much land there actually is, take it to a notary and a licensed surveyor before either figure goes anywhere near a price. A1 is not qualified to settle it and will not try.
Ask how old each number is
A half-yearly series and a quarterly one age at different rates, and this is where a good deal of confident quoting goes wrong.
The land reading above closes at the end of December 2025. The condominium reading closes at the end of March 2026. By the time either is being repeated in a conversation about a particular property, further months have usually passed on top of that, and only one of the two has had any opportunity to refresh in the meantime.
None of which makes an older figure wrong. It makes it older, which is a different objection and a fairer one. The working rule is to check the Central Bank’s own most recent release rather than the most recent article written about it, and to say the period out loud whenever the percentage is said out loud.
A figure carrying no period is not really a statistic. It is an impression with a decimal point in it.
What to do with the two numbers
If you own land, the land series is the relevant context, and the period quoted here closed in December 2025. Anything after that is not in it.
If you own a condominium for resale, note what the index measures. New stock sets the reference point buyers arrive with; your unit is competing against it rather than being measured by it, and the gap between those two positions is where most resale pricing arguments live.
If you own a house, use both series as background and neither as an answer. The building is doing too much of the work in that figure for a land indicator to reach it.
And if you are deciding between the two as a place to put money, that is an investment question rather than a market one. A1 does not give investment advice, and neither of these indices constitutes any.
The next step
The comparison worth having is not land against condominiums. It is your property against the handful of genuinely similar properties that have sold near it recently, and against whatever is on the market right now competing for the same buyer. A1 works across residential, commercial and land in seven districts, on either side of a sale or a letting, and will set that evidence out as a market appraisal.
If a lender or a court needs a formal figure instead, that comes from a chartered valuer. We will name one rather than produce something that merely resembles the document.