MahaRERA notice yields results: 700 ongoing projects completed

Mumbai: After serving notices to more than 19,000 promoters, MahaRERA’s monitoring cell has learnt that nearly 700 ongoing housing projects have been completed and another 705 lapsed projects have applied for re-registration

Mumbai: After serving notices to more than 19,000 promoters, MahaRERA’s monitoring cell has learnt that nearly 700 ongoing housing projects have been completed and another 705 lapsed projects have applied for re-registration.

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The notice states to update the project information or face action.

“The monitoring process has yielded positive results after our notices were sent in December and promoters have updated the information and it shows that 700 of these projects have been completed,” said a MahaRERA official.

Section 11 of the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act (RERA) mandates that promoters who have registered their projects with the housing regulator provide real-time updates on project construction every quarter on the MahaRERA portal. The objective was to enable the home buyers to see the construction status of a project.

However, promoters were not updating this information and the regulator did not have any mechanism to monitor this. The Authority then recently appointed retired IAS officer Sanjay Deshmukh as the nodal officer to monitor lapsed projects. Accordingly, around 19,539 projects registered from May 2017 to March 2022 were sent notices to respond within 30 days or face action.

Every month, an average of 125 to 150 ongoing projects get completed and their information is updated on the portal. From November to December, 116 and 138 projects were completed, respectively. However, in January 2023, the figure shot up to 700 projects due to the direct impact of the notices.

Similarly, the authority receives an average of 120 applications for re-registration of ongoing projects every month. However, in December and January, 705 projects applied for re-registration.

As per RERA provisions, the promoters must provide quarterly updates of any incremental changes in build plan approvals, physical progress of the projects, and present status of bookings of plots, apartments, units as well as garages. Promoters also have to provide self-certification if they have not withdrawn funds from a separate account where 70 per cent of projects funds must be deposited and used as construction progresses.

Promoters also have to provide annual statements of accounts from an auditor and quality assurance certificates from the project engineers as mandated by the Act.