The Real Estate (Regulation and Development), Act 2016 has been quite effective so far. The Authority has been taking strict actions against builders for non-compliance and violation of law.
Pre-RERA, the promoters / builders resorted to unfair trade practices including delay in handing over possession by not delivering the possession on the committed date, deceiving home buyers by selling on the basis of super built up area to include some portion of common area to extract more money, changing layout plans or cancelling allotment when the price of the home increased in future, charging extra money from buyers in the name of various taxes. Ultimately the home buyers were exploited in the absence of a proper legislation.
ERA
The enforcement of the new legislation was no less than a ray of hope the home buyers have been waiting for since long. The Act is not only regulating the Real Estate industry nationwide, but, has also brought in some very significant changes. Some of them are listed below –
– Uniformity in definitions for important components of real estate, like, “carpet area”, “common areas” etc.
– Transparency and Accountability in the real estate sector
– Customer management
– Timely completion of the projects
– Planned Projects
– Increase in FDI
– Fast-track dispute resolution mechanism
Though the Act has brought some good changes, but, there still remains a long way to go. While states like Maharashtra, Haryana, UP, etc. are leading in the implementation of RERA, there are states which are lacking in the same.
RERA has been passing orders / judgments in favor of aggrieved homebuyers but, rarely those orders / judgements are being executed.
The builders have to approach different authorities for the grant of approvals at various stages of the development of a project which is one of the main reasons for the delay in handover the project.
The Act mandates the builder to quarterly upload the project’s details on the website of RERA but, the information is either incomplete or questionable, further, it is quite a task for the homebuyers to access the same.
Author – CA Ramesh Agrawal (FCA & LLB) Partner Agrawal Gupta & Sahu from Delhi and can be contacted at rameshag.ca@gmail.com
Author Bio
