Builder and partner verification guide

Most people buying a home spend weeks comparing floor plans and about an hour checking whether the builder can actually deliver it. That ratio is backwards. A good layout on a project with a clouded title, or a promoter who has stalled two towers, is worth less than a plain layout you can be sure of. This guide walks through the checks that matter, in the order a careful buyer would run them, and points to where each record actually lives.

It is written for buyers looking at property in Karnataka. It is general guidance, not legal advice, and portal names and thresholds are current as of 2026.

Why verification is its own job

When you buy from another city or another country, almost everyone you deal with is paid by the seller. The channel partner earns on the sale. The builder’s sales team earns on the sale. Even the “trusted” broker a friend recommended is usually working a builder payout. None of that makes them dishonest, but it means no one in the room has your interest as their job. Verification is the part someone has to do on your behalf, and it is not the same as browsing listings.

It splits into two questions. Is the asset clean — meaning the land, the approvals, and the paperwork hold up. And can the promoter deliver — meaning their track record, their finances, and any disputes hanging over them. A project can pass the first and fail the second. A well-known builder can put a genuinely troubled project into the market. You check both, every time, and you check them before you pay a booking amount, because a booking receipt is much harder to unwind than a decision not to book.

The five checks, run in order:

1. RERA registration
2. Title and encumbrance
3. Statutory approvals and the sanctioned plan
4. Delivery history of the promoter
5. Litigation and financial health

Each one narrows what you have left to worry about.

1. RERA registration, and what the filing actually says

In Karnataka, a project has to be registered with the Real Estate Regulatory Authority if the land is over 500 square metres or it has more than eight units. That covers essentially every apartment project you would look at. The register is public at rera.karnataka.gov.in. There is no login and no fee to search it as a buyer.

Finding the registration number is the easy part. Reading the filing is where the value is. The promoter has to upload the sanctioned plan, the approved layout, the carpet area of each unit type, the list of approvals with their dates, the project’s bank account details, and a quarterly progress update. Check that the registration is live rather than lapsed or suspended, that the “proposed completion date” is one you can live with, and that the promoter’s PAN on the filing matches the entity you are actually signing with. If the sales brochure promises a clubhouse or a third tower that does not appear in the RERA filing, the filing is the version that counts. Pull the last two or three quarterly updates and see whether construction is tracking the promise or slipping every quarter.

2. Title and encumbrance

Title is the chain of ownership that ends with the seller having the clear right to sell. Encumbrance is any charge sitting on the property, most often a loan the developer took against the land, but also older mortgages, court attachments, or an unreleased earlier sale.

The encumbrance certificate comes from Kaveri Online Services, run by the Karnataka registration department. A non-certified copy is available online at once; a digitally signed copy costs a small fee and takes a few working days. Ask for the EC covering at least the last 13 years, and ideally 30. It lists every registered transaction on that survey number for the period. What you want to see is a clean run of ownership transfers with no surprise mortgage that was never released. If the developer has an active loan on the land, that is normal, but there must be a clear plan and a written commitment for how your unit gets released from that charge before or at registration.

Alongside the EC, a lawyer should read the parent documents: the mother deed, the conversion order that turned agricultural land into residential use, the khata, and the latest tax-paid receipts. In Bengaluru the khata question has shifted. Since the Kaveri system was linked to e-Khata, a verified e-Khata (through the e-Aasthi portal) is effectively required to register a property within city limits, and B-Khata to A-Khata conversion has its own process and fee. Your lawyer should confirm which khata the project land carries and what will be in place by the time you register.

3. Statutory approvals and the sanctioned plan

A project needs its building plan sanctioned by the right authority for where it sits: BBMP inside the city, BDA or BMRDA on the outskirts, or a local planning authority further out. It needs a commencement certificate before construction starts and, at the end, an occupancy certificate confirming it was built to the sanctioned plan and is fit to live in. Do not take possession, and do not make the final payment, without a genuine OC. A building without one can face water and power disconnection and penalties, and reselling it later is harder.

Match the sanctioned plan to what is being sold. Count the floors and the units. Developers sometimes market a version with extra floors they are still hoping to get approved. If the approval is not in hand, treat those units as not existing yet.

4. The promoter’s delivery history

The single best predictor of whether this project finishes on time is whether the promoter’s last few projects finished on time. Look at three or four of their completed projects. When were they launched, when was the OC actually received, and how far did that slip from the original commitment. Talk to residents in those buildings, not the ones the sales team introduces you to. Ask about construction quality a few years on, about how the handover went, and about whether common amenities were actually delivered or quietly dropped.

A promoter running many projects at once, all funded partly by pre-sales, is more fragile than the balance sheet suggests. If one project stalls, the cash it was feeding into the others stops. Ask how many projects they have under construction right now and how the current one is being funded.

5. Litigation and financial health

Search for the promoter’s name and the project name in consumer forum and RERA orders, which are on the public record, and in High Court case listings. A single dispute is not damning; construction throws up disputes. A pattern of complaints about delayed possession, or a RERA order directing the promoter to pay interest for delay, is a real warning. Also check for any land dispute on the specific survey number, since a project can be well run and still sit on contested land.

On finances, the signs a non-specialist can read are indirect: labour on site or a quiet site, materials stacked or not, subcontractors who have been paid or who have walked. A site visit on a normal working day tells you more than a Sunday showing.

Red flags that should stop a booking

• No RERA number, a lapsed one, or a promoter PAN that does not match the selling entity.
• The brochure and the RERA filing describe different projects — extra towers, extra floors, amenities that appear in one and not the other.
• An encumbrance certificate showing a mortgage with no written release plan for your unit.
• Agricultural land with no conversion order, or a conversion order that does not cover the whole project footprint.
• Possession being offered without an occupancy certificate, or “OC applied for” with no timeline.
• Pressure to pay a large booking amount in cash, or to an account that is not the RERA-designated project account.
• A promoter with two or more stalled projects, or a recent RERA order against them for delay.
• A price well below the guidance value with a request to under-report the sale value on the deed.

The six-signal trust score

NelaZo scores every builder and every service partner on six signals and shows the result next to the listing. The score is a starting point for your own judgement, not advice and not a guarantee. It is built to be transparent: you can see which signal is pulling the score up or down.

A first-pass check you can do in half an hour

Before you involve a lawyer or an advisor, you can rule a lot of projects in or out yourself.

1. Open rera.karnataka.gov.in, find the project, and confirm the registration is live. Note the promoter’s legal name and PAN.
2. Download the last two quarterly progress reports. Is construction tracking the plan.
3. On Kaveri Online Services, pull a free encumbrance certificate for the survey number for the last 13 years. Look for an unreleased mortgage.
4. Search the promoter’s name with the words “RERA order” and “consumer forum”. Read whatever comes up.
5. Check the guidance value for the location on the Kaveri portal and compare it to the quoted price. A large gap in either direction is worth asking about.

If the project clears all five, it is worth a proper legal opinion. If it fails any of them, you have saved yourself the cost of that opinion.

For NRIs buying from abroad

An NRI can buy residential or commercial property in India freely under FEMA. Agricultural land, farmhouses, and plantation property are not allowed. Payment has to come through banking channels — from an NRE, NRO, or FCNR account, or by inward remittance — never in foreign currency notes.

If you cannot be present for registration, you will execute a power of attorney. Keep it narrow: name the specific property, the specific acts you are authorising, and a person you would trust with your own bank account — usually a parent or sibling rather than anyone connected to the builder. A PoA executed abroad needs to be notarised there and then adjudicated and stamped in India within the prescribed period. Get this moving early, because it is a common cause of last-minute delay.

On tax, when you buy from a resident seller you deduct 1 percent TDS on the sale value if it is 50 lakh or more. When you buy from another NRI, the deduction is higher and works differently, and you need a TAN to deposit it. When you eventually sell, the buyer will deduct TDS from your proceeds at a rate that assumes the highest slab unless you get a lower-deduction certificate from the assessing officer. None of this is a reason not to buy; it is a reason to have a chartered accountant lined up before you sign, not after. Our returning NRI handbook covers the banking and residency side in more detail.