How to complain against a builder under RERA

Registration comes first. A promoter cannot advertise, market, book, sell or offer for sale any plot or apartment in a project that requires registration until the project is registered with the state authority. Very small projects, below a land area and unit-count threshold set in the Act, are exempt, and states may lower that threshold. If a project that should be registered is not, that is itself a contravention, and the authority can be informed of it separately from any individual grievance.

Disclosure follows registration. The promoter must upload the registration certificate, the sanctioned plan and layout, the approvals obtained and pending, the details of the land title, the declared date of completion, the proforma of the allotment letter and agreement for sale, and quarterly updates on construction progress and on the number of units booked. All of it is public.

The escrow requirement is the financial spine of the Act. A fixed proportion of the amounts realised from allottees must be deposited in a separate account for that project, and can be withdrawn only in proportion to the stage of completion, certified by an engineer, an architect and a chartered accountant. This is what is meant to stop money raised for one project funding another, which was the mechanism behind most of the stalled projects the Act was written in response to.

The agreement for sale is regulated. A promoter cannot accept more than a prescribed percentage of the cost as an advance or application fee without first entering into a registered agreement for sale. The agreement itself must follow the state's prescribed form, which fixes the completion date, the payment schedule, the interest payable by each side and the consequences of default — and makes the rate of interest payable by the promoter to the allottee the same as that payable by the allottee to the promoter.

Sale must be on carpet area, defined in the Act as the net usable floor area within the walls, excluding the external walls, areas under services shafts, the exclusive balcony or verandah and open terrace, but including the internal partition walls. The super built-up figure that used to be the basis of pricing is not a lawful basis of sale.

The promoter carries a defect liability of five years from the date of handing over possession, covering structural defects, defects in workmanship and quality of service, which must be rectified free of charge on notice. Failure to rectify converts into a compensation entitlement.

Two further obligations are frequently the real subject of the dispute: conveyance of the land and common areas to the association of allottees, and formation of that association itself. Both are promoter obligations with statutory timelines, and both are routinely unperformed for years after possession.

Start with the project registration number, which must appear on every advertisement and on the promoter's website. Search it on the state authority's portal and download everything filed under it.

Compare the declared completion date on the registration with the date in your agreement for sale. Where they differ, the discrepancy is a point in itself. Note whether the promoter has applied for and received an extension of the registration, on what ground, and whether the ground stated is genuinely a force majeure event within the Act rather than a commercial difficulty.

Read the quarterly progress updates against what you can see on the ground. A promoter certifying substantial progress in filings while the site is idle is making a statement to a regulator, and it is a much stronger complaint point than a description of the site.

Check the approvals list for anything still pending — an environmental clearance, a fire safety approval, a completion or occupancy certificate. Possession offered without an occupancy certificate is not lawful possession, and accepting it can compromise your position later.

Pull your own paper trail together: the allotment letter, the registered agreement for sale, every payment receipt and bank statement, the demand letters, all correspondence about the delay, and any offer of possession. Build a one-page chronology with dates. The authority is deciding a documented timeline, not an impression.

Compute what you are owed before you draft. For a refund claim, that is the total paid plus interest at the rate the Act and the state rules prescribe, from each payment date. For a delay claim, it is interest on the amounts paid for each month from the agreed handover date until possession. Present the computation as a schedule, because an authority that has to construct your arithmetic will construct it conservatively.

Finally, check whether the promoter is subject to insolvency proceedings. If a corporate insolvency resolution process has been admitted, a moratorium applies and the RERA route is effectively frozen — allottees become financial creditors in that process instead, and the plan of action is entirely different.

Identify the right authority. Jurisdiction follows the location of the project, not where you live. Each state and union territory has its own authority, its own rules, its own portal, its own complaint form and its own fee. A complaint filed with the wrong state's authority is not transferred; it is returned.

Decide who you are complaining to within that authority. The Act allows a complaint to the Authority itself, or to the adjudicating officer where compensation is claimed. The distinction matters: interest for delay and refunds are ordinarily dealt with by the Authority, while a claim for compensation goes to the adjudicating officer. Getting this wrong causes the complaint to be re-routed and delayed.

Register on the state authority's complaint portal and complete the online form. It will ask for the project registration number, the promoter's details, the complainant's details, the facts, the provisions of the Act alleged to be contravened, and the relief sought. Upload the agreement, the receipts, the correspondence and your chronology and computation as annexures.

State the relief precisely and elect between the alternatives. Either you withdraw from the project and claim the return of the amounts paid with interest, or you continue and claim interest for every month of delay until possession. You cannot have both for the same period. Add any consequential relief — conveyance of the deed, formation of the association, rectification of defects, correction of the carpet area — as separate numbered prayers.

Pay the prescribed complaint fee, which is fixed by the state rules and is modest, and submit. Keep the complaint number and the acknowledgement.

Attend the hearings. Proceedings are largely online in most states, are not bound by the strict rules of civil procedure, and a complainant may appear in person — a lawyer is permitted but not required. Several authorities also operate a conciliation forum, and where the promoter engages genuinely, a conciliated settlement recorded by the authority is faster than a contested order.

Get the order and read it against your prayers. Check that it specifies the amount, the rate and period of interest, and the time within which the promoter must pay or perform. Vague operative parts are the commonest reason execution fails later.

Where the project is not registered at all, the complaint route is different: inform the authority of the non-registration through the facility most states provide for exactly this, which costs nothing, and pursue your own contractual claim in parallel. The authority can act against the promoter for the contravention, and that pressure is often more effective than an individual claim.

Either side can appeal an order of the Authority or the adjudicating officer to the Real Estate Appellate Tribunal for that state, within the period the Act prescribes. The Tribunal is a judicial body and hears the matter afresh on the record.

There is one provision here that materially helps allottees. A promoter appealing an order requiring payment must first deposit with the Tribunal a prescribed share of the penalty, interest or compensation ordered. That deposit requirement is what stops an appeal being used purely as a delaying device, and it means a favourable order has real value even while an appeal is pending.

From the Tribunal, a further appeal lies to the High Court on the grounds the Act permits. In practice, most allottee matters end at the Tribunal.

Execution is where the system underperforms. An amount due under a RERA order that the promoter does not pay is recoverable as arrears of land revenue, which means the authority issues a recovery certificate and the district collector's revenue machinery is supposed to attach and sell the promoter's property to satisfy it. That machinery was not designed for this volume of work and is a well-documented bottleneck.

Practical responses exist. Follow the recovery certificate to the collector's office yourself and get a file number rather than assuming the authority is chasing it. Identify specific attachable assets — unsold inventory in the same project, land parcels, receivables — and name them in the execution application rather than leaving the collector to find them. Where several allottees hold orders against the same promoter, act together: a group of recovery certificates presented at once is treated differently from one.

If the promoter enters insolvency, the moratorium halts execution and the claims move into the resolution process, where homebuyers are treated as financial creditors and vote as a class through an authorised representative. This changes the arithmetic completely — the outcome becomes whatever the resolution plan provides, not what the RERA order said.

RERA covers registrable projects and the relationship between promoter and allottee. It does not cover a project that was completed and had received its completion certificate before the Act commenced, and it does not cover a purely private sale between two individuals.

It is not the forum for a title dispute. A defect in the promoter's title, a competing claim to the land, or a dispute with a third party over ownership is a civil court matter, whatever the authority may say about disclosure obligations.

It is not the forum for a construction defect after the defect liability period, for a dispute with a resident welfare association, or for a grievance against a bank over a home loan disbursement — that last one goes to the bank's grievance channel and then to the banking ombudsman scheme.

The consumer route remains available. Courts have held that the remedies under the real estate legislation do not oust a homebuyer's right to approach a consumer commission for deficiency in service, and for some claims — particularly where compensation for mental agony and litigation costs is sought — the consumer route can be preferable. What you cannot do is pursue the same claim in both forums simultaneously.

Where the promoter is a public authority or a development authority, the public grievance system is a parallel route worth running, and it produces a dated, tracked record at no cost.

Finally, prevention is worth more than any of these forums. Before paying anything on a new project, search the registration number on the state authority's portal, read the uploaded approvals and the declared completion date, check the promoter's other registered projects for extensions and complaints, and insist on a registered agreement for sale before crossing the statutory advance limit. Almost every dispute in this guide begins with money paid before that agreement existed.

The registered agreement for sale is the centre of gravity. It fixes the completion date, the payment schedule and the interest rates, and an authority will read the parties' rights out of it before anything else. An unregistered agreement, or a mere allotment letter, weakens the claim considerably — which is exactly why the Act caps what a promoter may collect before registering one.

Payment evidence has to be complete and traceable. Bank statements, receipts and the promoter's own ledger, reconciled against the agreed payment schedule. Any amount paid in cash outside the agreement is, in practice, unrecoverable, and demanding a receipt at the time is the only protection.

Correspondence about the delay matters more than it appears to. A sequence of emails asking for a revised handover date, and the promoter's evasive or shifting replies, establishes both the delay and the promoter's knowledge of it. Send everything in writing, even after a phone call, summarising what was said.

The offer of possession is a document to examine closely. An offer made without an occupancy certificate, or conditional on payment of charges not in the agreement, or of a unit whose carpet area differs from the agreement, is not a valid offer, and the delay continues to run. Do not take possession under protest without recording the protest in writing at the time.

Photographs of the site with dates, read against the promoter's quarterly progress filings, are simple and effective evidence of a false certification.

Where several allottees are affected — which is nearly always — file individually but coordinate. The Act allows an association of allottees to complain, and authorities list connected matters together. A coordinated set of complaints with a common chronology is heard faster, produces consistent orders and is far more effective at the recovery stage than a scattered set.