Section 3: what a builder may not do before registration

Venkatesh Skydove is not registered with MahaRERA. No registration number has been issued for it, and none is published anywhere on this website.

Most sites treat that as a missing field. It is not. It is the single most consequential fact about the project’s current legal status, and it is worth understanding properly rather than skipping.

What the section actually says

Section 3(1) of the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act 2016 provides that no promoter shall advertise, market, book, sell or offer for sale, or invite persons to purchase in any way, any plot, apartment or building in a real estate project, or any part of it, in any planning area, without registering the project with the Real Estate Regulatory Authority.

Read the verbs. Advertise. Market. Book. Sell. Offer for sale. Invite to purchase. It is a wide list, and it is deliberately wide.

What follows from that

Three things, in order of importance to you.

• Nobody should be taking your money. Not a token, not a booking amount, not a refundable expression of interest. If somebody asks, check the registration status yourself on the MahaRERA portal before you do anything else.
• No specification you are shown is binding. Areas, layouts, amenities and dates only become enforceable once they are filed against a registration and written into a registered agreement.
• The regulator has no file on the project. There is nothing to complain about to, because there is nothing registered to complain about.

Why this site exists anyway

A fair question. The answer is that we publish what the developer has released, say plainly what has not been released, take no money and make no offer, and we do not compete for the query by inventing the missing half.

Three other pages rank for this project today. Between them they publish carpet areas, a price band, an amenity list of over forty items, a possession date and a distance table. None of that came from the developer. Somebody searching this project name is going to find something. Better that one of the results is accurate about what is and is not known.

This site is also built with search indexing switched off and carries no registration block, precisely because of the section above.

What the number will unlock

On the day a registration is granted, seven things go from unknowable to public.

1. The promoter as a legal entity, rather than a brand name.
2. The sanctioned layout, as a file you can download.
3. The declared completion date for that phase.
4. The filed carpet areas.
5. Quarterly progress filings against the declared programme.
6. Every other project registered by the same promoter.
7. Complaints filed against them, and how they were decided.

That is a genuinely large amount of free diligence, and it is the reason the registration is worth waiting for rather than working around.

The practical position today

Registering interest in an unregistered project is not itself unlawful for you, and it costs nothing. Paying money is where the problem starts.

So the sensible posture is the one this site is built around. Learn the project, do the diligence that is available now, including visiting the developer’s two existing buildings on this road, and hold your cheque book until a number exists.

This is general information about a statute rather than legal advice. Verify the current registration status yourself at maharera.maharashtra.gov.in, and have your own agreement read by a lawyer before you sign it.