The Document Set Every Resale Buyer Must Demand

First, the uncomfortable part: registration is not a title guarantee

India does not guarantee title. The Sub-Registrar records that a document was presented, stamped and registered. He does not certify that the person who signed it owned anything. There is no state title insurance behind your sale deed, and no official who has checked the seller’s ownership on your behalf.

Two provisions do most of the work here. Section 54 of the Transfer of Property Act, 1882 says that a sale of tangible immovable property worth one hundred rupees or more can be made only by a registered instrument, and that a contract for sale “does not, of itself, create any interest in or charge on such property.” Section 49 of the Registration Act, 1908 says that a document which required registration and did not get it shall not affect the property and shall not be received as evidence of any transaction affecting it.

INTERPRETATION Put together, those two sections mean the document you must see is a registered conveyance. A registered agreement to sell is not one. Registering an agreement to sell makes it admissible and gives it public notice; it does not turn it into a transfer. This distinction is responsible for a large share of the resale disputes that reach Indian courts, because a buyer who paid on an agreement to sell has a claim against a person, not a right in a property.

Group one — the title chain

The registered sale deed in the seller’s name, and behind it the mother deed and every registered conveyance since. You are looking for an unbroken sequence in which each seller is the previous buyer. A gap is not a paperwork problem. A gap means somewhere in that sequence, somebody transferred property they may not have owned.

The encumbrance certificate, if your state issues one. This is where most checklists written for a national audience go wrong, because they assume the southern model applies everywhere. It does not, and the differences matter:

INTERPRETATION A Delhi non-encumbrance certificate and a Tamil Nadu encumbrance certificate are not the same product and should not be given the same weight. One is a search of a register; the other is an administrative certificate assembled from a search plus sworn statements by lawyers.

And here is what no encumbrance certificate, anywhere, can show you. Section 57 of the Registration Act opens Books No. 1 and 2 and the index to Book No. 1 to public inspection, and that is the entire raw material an EC is built from. Anything that never went to the Sub-Registrar is invisible to it. So an EC will not show:

• an unregistered agreement to sell — and a rival buyer holding one, in possession, may raise a part-performance defence under section 53A of the Transfer of Property Act;
• an equitable mortgage created by deposit of title deeds — the classic Indian home loan security, where the bank holds the originals and nothing is registered;
• pending litigation, because a suit is not a registered instrument;
• property tax arrears, society dues, utility arrears, or unpaid lease dues to a development authority.

FACT A clean encumbrance certificate is entirely consistent with a live bank charge on the flat you are buying.

Group two — permission for the building to exist

The occupancy certificate. The Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 defines it at section 2(zf) as the certificate “permitting occupation of any building, as provided under local laws, which has provision for civic infrastructure such as water, sanitation and electricity,” and section 11(4)(b) makes obtaining it and giving it to allottees the promoter’s responsibility, not a favour.

A large amount of older Indian resale stock does not have one. OPINION Buying without an OC is not automatically wrong — whole neighbourhoods trade this way — but you should price it, not ignore it. What the absence costs you is real: many lenders will not fund it, the utility position is weaker, common areas cannot be conveyed cleanly, and the illegality is never cured by time. Karnataka’s own statute now says so in terms. Under section 147(3) of the Greater Bengaluru Governance Act, 2024, tax may be levied on a building “occupied without issuance of occupancy certificate,” but that levy “does not confer any right to regularize violation made, or title, ownership or legal status to such building. Such buildings shall always be liable for any action for violation of law.”

The approved plan, and a walk through the flat with it in your hand. The question is not whether the plan is beautiful. It is whether the flat in front of you matches it. An enclosed balcony, a covered terrace, an extra room on the setback — each of those is a deviation the buyer inherits.

The lease certificate, if the land is leasehold. This is the most-skipped document in NCR resale, and it has its own provision: RERA section 11(4)(c) requires the promoter to obtain a lease certificate “specifying the period of lease, and certifying that all dues and charges in regard to the leasehold land has been paid.” If the original developer never cleared its dues to the Authority, the Authority can refuse to record your transfer, and you will discover this after you have paid.

Group three — the society, and the money it is not allowed to ask you for

In Maharashtra the co-operative housing society rules are published, and they are far more favourable to buyers than the market behaves. Under bye-law 38(d) of the Model Bye-laws issued by the Commissioner for Cooperation and Registrar of Co-operative Societies:

What actually matters is the transfer of the share certificate and the admission of the buyer to membership under bye-law 38(e). And the money the society may charge for that is capped:

FACT Bye-law 38(e)(ix) is explicit: “No additional amount towards donation or contribution to any other funds or under any other pretext shall be recovered from transferor or transferee.” The premium ceiling steps down outside corporation areas — ₹20,000 in ‘A’ class municipalities, ₹15,000 in ‘B’ grade, ₹10,000 in ‘C’ grade and ₹5,000 in gram panchayat areas — and no premium is payable at all on a transfer to a family member, nominee or heir, or on a mutual exchange between two members.

INTERPRETATION These are Maharashtra’s bye-laws. Other states run their own co-operative statutes and their own ceilings. But the shape of the problem is national: the sum a society demands at transfer is very often a number with no instrument behind it, and the way to test that is to ask, in writing, which bye-law or government order authorises the amount.

Group four — the loan, the charge, and the sequence that actually works

This is the part of a resale that goes wrong for structural reasons rather than dishonest ones.

Where the seller still has a home loan, the entire chain of title is in the lender’s vault as security. The seller cannot hand you the originals before the loan closes. You will not close the loan before you see the originals. Both positions are reasonable and they deadlock.

What breaks the deadlock is a Reserve Bank direction most buyers have never heard of. Under RBI circular RBI/2023-24/60 dated 13 September 2023, in force from 1 December 2023:

It binds commercial banks, small finance banks, regional rural banks, local area banks, urban and state and district co-operative banks, NBFCs including housing finance companies, and asset reconstruction companies.

INTERPRETATION Two things in that sentence are routinely missed. First, releasing the paper and removing the registered charge are two separate acts. A loan can be fully repaid, the originals returned, and a charge still sitting live against the property because nobody filed the satisfaction. Second, the ₹5,000 a day is a right that belongs to the borrower — your seller — not to you. A seller who has no intention of invoking it will happily let a lender take three months. Make invoking it a term of your agreement.

The sequence that works: your funds go to the seller’s lender against a written foreclosure statement, not to the seller; the lender issues the closure letter; the 30-day clock starts; you take delivery of the originals and written confirmation the charge has been removed; and only then does the balance move. Your own loan sanction, if you are taking one, should be conditional on that confirmation, not on the closure letter alone. If you are still sizing the loan, work the instalment before you commit to the sequence — our EMI calculator takes rate, tenure and amount.

Group five — the tax, which changed completely on 1 April 2026

FACT The Income-tax Act, 1961 was repealed and replaced by the Income-tax Act, 2025 with effect from 1 April 2026. Almost every resale checklist on the Indian web still tells buyers to deduct tax under section 194-IA and file Form 26QB. For a transaction in 2026, both references are wrong.

The substance of the buyer’s duty has not changed: deduct 1% where the consideration or the stamp duty value is ₹50 lakh or more, on whichever of the two is higher. What trips people up is the threshold test, so here is the arithmetic on three real shapes of deal:

The second row is the one worth memorising. The Notes to section 393(1) provide that consideration “shall be the aggregate of the amounts paid or payable by all the transferees to the transferor or all the transferors,” and that tax is deducted where the consideration or the stamp duty value “is equal to or greater than fifty lakh rupees.” Splitting a flat between two buyers to get under ₹50 lakh has not worked since 1 October 2024, and the rule is now written into the statute itself. If the gap between your agreed price and the circle rate is what is driving the number, we worked that problem through in Why the same flat has four different prices, and you can size the duty itself with the stamp duty calculator.

If the seller is an NRI, the rules are different and one of them changes this month

Buying from a non-resident does not attract the 1% rate. It falls under section 393(2), Table Sl. No. 17, at “rates in force” — which means the applicable capital gains rate plus surcharge and cess, a materially larger deduction. OPINION Do not compute this from a blog. The composite rate depends on the seller’s income slab for surcharge, and getting it wrong makes you, the buyer, the person the department pursues.

FACT Until 30 September 2026, a resident individual buying from an NRI must obtain a TAN to deduct. From 1 October 2026, that requirement goes: the Memorandum to the Finance Bill, 2026 records an amendment to section 397(1)(c), introduced by clause 75, so that a resident individual or Hindu undivided family “is not required to obtain TAN to deduct tax at source in respect of any consideration on transfer of any immovable property.” The duty to deduct is unchanged. Only the TAN goes.

INTERPRETATION If you are buying from an NRI and closing in the next three weeks, the compliance burden is measurably different from the same deal closing in October. That is worth a conversation about the registration date. We keep a dated record of changes like this on the property law changes page.

And on the seller’s side, one election worth a lot of money

Land or a building is long-term after 24 months. Long-term capital gains are taxed at 12.5% without indexation, indexation having been withdrawn for transfers on or after 23 July 2024. But section 197 of the 2025 Act preserves a choice for resident individuals and HUFs selling land or a building acquired before 23 July 2024: 12.5% without indexation, or 20% with indexed cost, and the excess of the first over the second is disregarded. In practice the seller pays the lower of the two.

OPINION This matters to a buyer because it is often what makes a hesitant long-holding seller move. Computing the indexed figure needs the Cost Inflation Index notified for the year — take that from the CBDT notification, not from a calculator that has not been updated since 2024. Ours will size the plain 12.5% case: capital gains calculator.

What we could not confirm, and what to do about it

Resale of leasehold property in NCR carries a transfer charge payable to the development authority, on top of stamp duty and registration. It is a real cost, it is often large, and it surprises buyers.

FACT We could not obtain a current, officially published transfer-charge schedule from the Noida Authority, the Greater Noida Industrial Development Authority, or the Ghaziabad Development Authority. The Delhi Development Authority does publish a conversion-charge page, but the indexed rate table on it runs only to financial year 2018–19, and the scheme document it links describes its own rates as provisional and subject to final determination.

We are saying that plainly rather than reprinting a number from a property blog. Every current figure we found for these authorities came from listing sites and brokerages, and no two agreed. INTERPRETATION The only safe instruction is: get the transfer charge in writing from the Authority’s transfer desk before you sign an agreement to sell, and make the agreement conditional on it. Treat any figure quoted to you verbally, by anyone, as an estimate.

Bengaluru: khata is a tax record, not title

Since the Greater Bengaluru Governance Act, 2024, this is spelled out in statute rather than left to practice. Section 2(34) defines khata as “a record of an immovable property maintained in the property tax register by the City Corporation,” and section 2(35) says the khata entry “shall be presumed to be true until the contrary is proved or a new entry is lawfully substituted.”

INTERPRETATION A rebuttable presumption about who pays the tax is not a declaration of ownership. “I have A-khata” is not “I have title,” and a buyer who treats it as one has skipped the title chain.

Two further points from the same Act that a 2026 buyer needs. First, section 147(3) requires unlawful buildings and their tax to be kept in a separate register — the thing the market calls B-khata — and expressly denies that paying that tax regularises anything. Second, the second proviso to section 147(3) sets a hard wall: no such tax may be levied or collected, and no such registration made in any property tax register, for unauthorised buildings or plots created after 30 September 2024, with the date of a valid BESCOM connection treated as the date of construction. A property built after that date without authorisation cannot get even a B-register entry. That is worse than B-khata, not better.

And mutation is not registration. Section 149 gives the parties three months after execution or registration of the transfer to notify the Commissioner, and a transferor who fails to do so “shall continue to be liable for the payment of the property tax.” Registration moves title before the Sub-Registrar; mutation moves the tax liability before the Commissioner. Doing one does not do the other. There is a fuller note on each of these terms in our glossary of Indian real estate terms, and the state-level position is set out under state rules.

What could go wrong

• The seller has a right against a builder, not a flat. If the first owner took possession but never got a registered conveyance deed, there is nothing to convey to you. RERA section 17(1) requires the promoter to execute a registered conveyance, and section 19(10) requires the allottee to take physical possession within two months of the occupancy certificate — but a possession letter is an administrative note that you may move in. It transfers nothing. Ask for the conveyance, not the possession letter.
• Somebody else is living there. A clean encumbrance certificate on a flat with an occupant is not comfort. A transferee in possession under a written contract who has performed his part can defend that possession under section 53A of the Transfer of Property Act.
• The charge is never satisfied. The loan closes, the paper comes back, and a live charge sits against the property for years until your own buyer’s lawyer finds it.
• The authority refuses the transfer on leasehold land because the original developer’s dues were never cleared.
• The society invents a number. See the table above.

Questions to ask before you pay anything

• Show me the registered conveyance deed in your name — not the allotment letter, not the possession letter, not the agreement to sell.
• Who physically holds the original documents right now? If the answer is a bank, there is a loan, whatever the encumbrance certificate says.
• Is there an occupancy certificate? If not, when was the building completed, and what has the municipal position been since?
• Is the land freehold or leasehold? If leasehold, show me the lease certificate and the Authority’s current dues position.
• Which bye-law or government order authorises the transfer amount the society is asking for?
• Has the property been mutated into your name, and when?
• What is the stamp duty value of this property today, and how does it compare with what we have agreed?
• If you are a non-resident, please confirm that in writing now, before we fix a registration date.
• Will you accept a sequence in which my funds go to your lender directly, against its foreclosure statement?

If you want the wider picture of who takes what out of an Indian property transaction, start with Who pays whom in an Indian property deal.