RERA: Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act

Imagine paying a contractor upfront for a home renovation based on nothing but a glossy brochure and a verbal promise, with no legal recourse if the contractor simply spends the money on an entirely different project and delivers your renovation years late, if at all. That was, for decades, the real risk an Indian homebuyer accepted the moment they booked an under-construction flat, until RERA arrived.

The Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, passed in 2016 and fully implemented from May 2017, requires real estate projects above a certain size to register with a state regulatory authority before any sale or advertisement, mandates that developers deposit 70% of funds collected from buyers into a dedicated project escrow account, usable only for that specific project's construction and land costs, and gives buyers a clear legal forum to seek compensation or refunds for delays.

The escrow requirement is the Act's single most consequential provision in practice, it directly attacks the old, common practice of developers using one project's buyer funds to finance a completely different, unrelated project, a diversion that had left many Indian homebuyers with years-delayed or entirely abandoned flats and no straightforward legal remedy.

RERA compliance has been reinforced steadily since, with more recent amendments requiring builders to submit quarterly project progress and financial disclosures on state RERA websites, and a Unified RERA Portal launched in September 2025 to bring greater national consistency and transparency across what had previously been a somewhat fragmented, state-by-state implementation of the same central law.

Whenever an Indian homebuyer checks a project's registration number or reads its published construction timeline before booking a flat, RERA is the specific legal framework making that due diligence possible at all, information a homebuyer simply had no reliable, enforceable right to before 2017.