Legal work across residential, commercial and mixed-use development: RERA compliance and proceedings, title and land disputes, joint development structures, construction arbitration, lease and tenancy disputes, and insolvency involving developers.
Real estate disputes are usually decided on documents created years before the dispute. A defect in title, a permission taken on a plan that was later revised, a joint development agreement whose area-sharing clause does not survive a change in the sanctioned plan. Each surfaces at the point of sale, of possession, or of financing, long after the moment at which it could have been cured cheaply.
RERA and the allottee
The Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 changed the structure of the developer-purchaser relationship: registration of the project, disclosure of the plan and the timetable, the separate account for receipts, and a statutory remedy for delay. Proceedings run before the state authority and then the appellate tribunal, and the questions that recur are the date from which delay is counted, what the sanctioned plan permitted, and whether the agreement for sale conformed to the prescribed form.
Title, and what disturbs it
Title work is verification followed by risk allocation. Encumbrance, succession, agricultural conversion, tenancy and the effect of an earlier unregistered arrangement are each capable of defeating a transfer. Where the question is already contested, the remedies are a suit for declaration, for specific performance or for injunction, with the limitation position often decisive.
Where the project fails
A stalled project puts three regimes over the same asset at once: the allottees' remedies under RERA, the secured lender's enforcement under SARFAESI, and, if admitted, the moratorium in insolvency, where homebuyers are financial creditors. Which regime prevails at a given moment is a question of sequence, and it determines what any party can usefully do next.
