The Prestige Southern Star price you see advertised is ₹1.66 Cr for a 3 BHK. The number you actually sign for is closer to ₹1.87 Cr, and that’s before the developer’s own extras. This is the full arithmetic, line by line, with the statutory rates checked against what Karnataka charges today rather than what a calculator remembers from last year.

The base price ladder

Four configurations are open at the time of writing. The smaller stock that launched with the project has gone, and that changes the entry point substantially.

Treat this ladder as indicative. It comes from a single published source. A second source quotes the 3 BHK entry at ₹1.68 Cr rather than ₹1.66 Cr, which is a small enough gap to be a different unit on a different floor. What you should not do is plan a loan around either figure without a dated cost sheet in your hand.

Why there’s no price per square foot here

Most price articles lead with a rate per square foot because it lets you compare projects quickly. We’re not giving you one, and the reason is worth explaining rather than hiding.

One published source puts the rate at approximately ₹11,500 per sq ft. Another gives a band of ₹12,000 to ₹14,600. Those aren’t rounding differences. At the bottom of that range a 1,500 sq ft flat is ₹1.73 Cr; at the top it’s ₹2.19 Cr. The spread is ₹46 lakh on the same flat.

Averaging them would produce a number that no source supports and no developer would honour. Picking the lower one would be flattering and dishonest. So the rate is omitted, and the same goes for the site’s land area, which four sources give as 30, 32.5, 34 and 35 acres.

The statutory charges, worked properly

These are the charges that go to the government. They apply to any under-construction apartment in Bengaluru regardless of who built it, and they are not negotiable with the developer.

GST on an under-construction residential flat runs at 5% with no input tax credit. Stamp duty for a property above ₹45 lakh is 5%. On top of the stamp duty sit two smaller charges: a cess at 10% of the stamp duty, and a surcharge at 2% of the stamp duty within BBMP limits. Registration is 2% of the property value.

Put together, stamp duty plus cess plus surcharge comes to about 5.6% of the value, registration adds 2%, and GST adds 5%. That’s 12.6% in total.

The registration change that catches everyone

On 31 August 2025 Karnataka doubled the property registration charge from 1% to 2%. It was a single line in a finance notification and it went largely unremarked, but it changes the arithmetic on every purchase in the state.

On the ₹1.66 Cr Aspire, registration at the old rate would have been ₹1.66 lakh. At the current rate it’s ₹3.32 lakh. That’s an extra ₹1.66 lakh you need in cash at registration, because unlike the base price it generally isn’t funded by your home loan.

The problem is that a great many online stamp duty calculators, spreadsheet templates and even some developer cost sheets still carry 1%. If your budget was built on one of those, you’re short.

Scaling it up the ladder

Statutory charges are a fixed percentage, which means they grow exactly as fast as the home does. That’s obvious stated plainly and surprisingly easy to forget when you’re upgrading from a 3 BHK to a 4 BHK in a sales gallery.

Moving from the Aspire to the Magnus looks like a ₹1.34 Cr decision on the base price. Once the state takes its share it’s a ₹1.51 Cr decision. The extra ₹17 lakh buys you nothing you can live in.

What the developer adds on top

The 12.6% above is only the statutory layer. Separately, the developer applies its own charges, and these are the ones that vary most between units and between buyers.

Expect a floor rise charge, which increases with height and on a 26-floor tower can be substantial between a fourth-floor and a twenty-fourth-floor unit. Expect a covered car parking charge. Expect a one-time clubhouse or amenity charge, a maintenance corpus deposit held against future upkeep, and separate khata and legal fees.

None of these are unusual and none are hidden in a sinister sense. But they are not on the headline price, they differ unit by unit, and they can add several lakh. The only way to know your number is a cost sheet for your specific unit, dated, with every line itemised.

What the loan actually covers

This is the part that reshapes most people’s budget, and it’s worth doing before you fall in love with a floor plan.

A lender underwrites against the agreement value — the base price on your sale agreement. It will typically fund a percentage of that figure, with the remainder as your down payment. What it generally will not fund is the statutory layer: GST, stamp duty, cess, surcharge and registration. Nor will it usually fund the developer’s incidentals like floor rise or the clubhouse charge.

Run that through the entry 3 BHK. The agreement value is ₹1.66 Cr. Your down payment is a share of that. On top, and separately, you need roughly ₹20.9 lakh for statutory charges plus whatever floor rise, parking, corpus and legal come to. All of that is cash, and most of it lands at or near registration.

There’s a second timing wrinkle. Under-construction projects are usually sold on a construction-linked plan, so the payments arrive in tranches as slabs are cast rather than in one lump. That’s easier on cash flow than it sounds, but it also means you’ll be servicing pre-EMI interest on a partly disbursed loan for years before you have a flat to live in — and if you’re renting meanwhile, you’re carrying both at once. With possession in September 2029, that’s a long overlap.

What to hold in cash

A home loan typically funds a percentage of the agreement value. It does not usually fund GST, stamp duty, registration, or the developer’s incidental charges. That means the statutory layer largely comes out of your own pocket, at the moment of registration.

On the entry 3 BHK, plan for roughly ₹21 lakh in statutory charges plus whatever the developer’s extras come to. Against a ₹1.66 Cr flat with a typical loan, the cash requirement is materially larger than a first-time buyer expects.

Work this out before you pay a booking amount, not after. A booking amount is easy to pay and awkward to recover, and the point at which people discover the shortfall is usually the point at which they’ve already committed.

A rough sanity check: take the base price, add 12.6%, then add another few lakh for the developer’s extras, and ask whether the total still sits inside your budget with room to spare. If it only works exactly, it doesn’t work — construction-linked purchases have a way of producing costs that weren’t on the first sheet.

Questions worth asking before you pay anything

Four requests, all of which a developer can satisfy from documents it already holds.

Ask for the dated, unit-specific cost sheet with every line itemised, including floor rise and parking. Ask for the carpet against saleable figure for that unit. Ask for the sanctioned plan, which settles the land-area question that the published sources can’t. And pull the RERA registration yourself on the Karnataka portal, checking that the promoter reads Prestige Acres Private Limited and reading the declared completion date.

If all four come back cleanly, you’re making an informed decision. If any of them meets resistance, that’s worth more attention than any brochure.

One more worth adding, specific to this project: ask for the payment schedule and check when the largest tranches fall. On a build running to September 2029, the difference between a front-loaded and a back-loaded schedule is years of interest, and it is entirely knowable before you commit.