Leaks, cracks and seepage after possession: making builder liability for defects work

The first heavy rain of the monsoon finds every shortcut a building took. A grey patch spreads behind a new wardrobe, paint lifts off a bathroom ceiling, and a crack that was a fine line in March is a damp line by July. For anyone who took the keys in the last five years, this is the moment builder liability for defects stops being a clause in an agreement nobody reread and becomes a deadline: the promoter has 30 days to fix what you report, and you have five years from possession to report it. Most of what decides whether the repair happens is what you put in writing in the next fortnight.

Suresh and Kavita's first monsoon#

Suresh and Kavita (illustrative, as our stories always are) had already been to MahaRERA once over their Pune retirement flat, when its possession date slipped, and they moved in from Ahmedabad with the possession letter filed beside the agreement. Their first monsoon brought two problems: a damp patch creeping across the bedroom's external wall, and water beading on the bathroom ceiling beside the plumbing shaft. The site supervisor sent a painter, who rolled waterproof paint over the stain and told Kavita that new buildings sweat in their first rains. Three weeks later the stain was back, larger, and the shaft was still dripping. Names and numbers in this story are illustrative.

Handover day has its own inspection checklist. This article starts after the keys, when the snag list is closed and the building begins to show what it is made of.

What the law actually says#

Section 14(3) of the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 is one sentence. If any structural defect, any other defect in workmanship, quality or provision of services, or any other obligation of the promoter under the agreement for sale is brought to the promoter's notice by the allottee within five years from the date of handing over possession, the promoter must rectify it without further charge within 30 days. If it fails to, the aggrieved allottees are entitled to appropriate compensation in the manner the Act provides.

Four features of that sentence do most of the work:

• It is wide. Workmanship and quality cover seepage, leakage and failed waterproofing, and the agreement's obligations bring in what you were promised and did not get, including amenities.
• It is not confined to your flat. Nothing in it limits the defect to the apartment, and MahaRERA has applied it to a leaking terrace that damaged a building's walls, lifts and flats.
• It runs on a notice clock. The five years govern when the defect is reported, not when a complaint is heard, and the 30 days are for the repair, not for a reply.
• It is free. "Without further charge" leaves no room for a repair bill or a visit fee.

Conveyance does not end it. The proviso to section 11(4)(a) keeps the promoter responsible for structural and other defects for the section 14(3) period even after the conveyance deeds are executed, so taking the land into the society's name, by agreement or through deemed conveyance, is no reason to stop counting.

Maharashtra writes it into the agreement. Clause 7.4 of the model agreement for sale says a defect reported within five years of handing over is to be rectified at the promoter's cost wherever possible, with compensation where it cannot be. MahaRERA's Order 38/2022 of 13 December 2022 bars promoters from leaving that clause out or cutting it short, on pain of summary rejection of the registration application, and if your agreement gives fewer than five years, the Act's five still apply. The rest of the agreement is covered in the model agreement's ten clauses.

Five years from when: possession, the OC and the date that protects you#

Both the Act and the model agreement start the five years at the handing over of possession, not at the occupancy certificate. Possession is a fact about your flat, recorded in your possession letter; the OC is a fact about the building, one public date for every owner.

The gap between them is where timing gets argued. In a society's complaint about a leaking terrace, the building's OC dated from October 2017, and the complaint was filed in October 2022, five years on. The society had existed since December 2018; it commissioned a structural audit in April 2022 and sent a legal notice, unanswered, in September 2022, a few weeks inside five years of the OC. MahaRERA directed the promoter to complete the audit's repairs within two months.

So keep your possession letter, find the OC date, count from the earlier of the two, and send every notice well inside five years of it, so that no claim depends on an argument about which date applies.

If you are not sure when your building's OC came, its free project page on ReraGenie shows whether the occupancy certificate slot holds a document and when it was uploaded, with the certificate itself among the filed documents. The upload date is not the date of issue, so read the certificate.

What MahaRERA has ordered fixed, and where the line falls#

Every one of the recent orders below began with water.

• Seepage that kept coming back. On 2 January 2026, MahaRERA directed the promoter of a Pune project to permanently fix seepage and structural defects in a buyer's flat within 30 days at its own cost, finding its earlier repairs superficial.
• Leakage proved by photographs. In another Pune case, MahaRERA held that the complainant's photographs clearly showed leakage inside the flat, establishing a deficiency in construction, and directed the promoters to repair it within 30 days so that it would not recur. The complainant's repeated written and oral requests had gone unanswered.
• A terrace left unfinished. In the society's complaint above, an incomplete and unsafe terrace on the 16th floor leaked into walls, lifts and flats; the society's structural audit put the repairs at over Rs 70 lakh plus GST.
• A public promoter too. MahaRERA has given MHADA's Pune board the same 30-day direction over seepage and leakage in a buyer's flat.

What the section does not reach is set by its own words. Ordinary wear from years of use is not a defect in the promoter's workmanship, and damage your own contractor causes while retiling a bathroom is not the promoter's work at all. A crack through a beam or column is a structural defect in the plainest sense; a hairline crack in plaster is where the argument starts, and it is settled by its cause, which is a question for an engineer rather than for either side's adjectives.

Your flat or the building: whose claim it is#

The water in Suresh and Kavita's bathroom came from a shaft that belongs to the building, and that decides who writes to the promoter.

A defect inside your flat, in its walls, floors, plaster, fittings or the waterproofing under your own bathroom, is yours to report, and since section 14(3) speaks of notice by the allottee, the notice should go out in the name on the agreement. A defect in a common part, the terrace, external walls, shafts, lift pits or underground tank, is the building's, and once a society exists it is the society's to press. MahaRERA drew that line in the Pune leakage case: it ordered the leak inside the member's flat fixed, but held that requests about lift defects, transformer cabling, lift cameras and the gym, clubhouse and pool fell outside the scope of an individual complaint. The orders that reached the building came from societies: the terrace case, and a Kiwale society's complaint of seepage through walls, ceilings, floors and the fire water tank, which ended on 19 May 2026 in an order to rectify structural defects and deliver pending amenities within 60 days.

So a damp patch that starts at an external wall can be two claims at once: your notice for the flat, and the committee's for the wall. A building whose society forms late also has fewer of its five years left, one reason the first twelve months after possession matter as much as they do.

The remedy paths, compared#

If the promoter is engaged but slow, MahaRERA's conciliation forum is the place to agree a repair schedule without a contested hearing; if it is not, the complaint is the route, and a disputed order goes on to the appellate tribunal. The consumer commission hears deficiency-in-service claims too, but for a registered project MahaRERA is the forum built around this duty, and the choice between the two is one to make once.

An analogy: the warranty you never had to register#

The closest everyday comparison is the warranty on a new refrigerator, with two differences in your favour. Like a warranty, it pays for a fault in the product, not for the dent you made moving it in, and a claim in the last week counts as fully as one in the first. Unlike a warranty, you never registered for it and cannot lose it by forgetting to: it is written into the Act, the promoter may not shorten it, and it survives the conveyance of the building.

What the regulator's numbers say#

MahaRERA does not publish how many complaints concern defects, so the honest figures are totals. Reporting on October 2024 to July 2025, it listed poor construction quality among the common issues in the complaints it resolved, beside delayed possession and missing amenities, and said first hearings were now being scheduled within one or two months of registration.

On 5 January 2026, MahaRERA said it had resolved a record 6,945 complaints in 2025, and RERA authorities nationally had disposed of 1,47,383 complaints according to the figures presented at the Central Advisory Council's meeting of 4 September 2025.

The sequence, from notice to order#

What to do this week#

1. Start a dated photo record. Wide shots, close-ups with a coin for scale, and a video during rain; in the Pune leakage case, photographs established the deficiency.
2. Fix your dates. Note the possession and OC dates and diarise five years from the earlier.
3. Send the notice in the allottee's name, by email and as a signed copy with proof of delivery: each defect numbered with its location and photographs, section 14(3) cited, and the cause to be found and fixed without charge within 30 days.
4. Put the building's share to the society in writing, for the committee to minute and raise with the promoter.
5. Read the promoter's own quality statement. MahaRERA's General (Amendment) Regulations, 2024 require promoters to file an annual quality assurance certificate covering matters such as structural design and materials, and to publish it on their website. If yours did, it is the promoter's own account of the work you are reporting.
6. Book an engineer if it recurs or looks structural. A report naming the cause and the repair becomes the list MahaRERA can order done, as the society's audit did in the terrace case; who signed for your building shows who certified the structure.

When the 30 days pass without a lasting repair, follow how to file a MahaRERA complaint.

What Suresh and Kavita did#

Kavita photographed both walls through August with the date showing. Suresh, in whose sole name the flat stands, wrote to the promoter citing section 14(3), listing the bedroom wall and the bathroom ceiling with photographs and asking for the cause to be found and fixed within 30 days. Kavita took the shaft to the society's committee, which wrote to the promoter and called in a structural engineer. The engineer traced the bedroom damp to an unsealed joint between the window frame and the wall, and the bathroom water to a failed joint in the shared drain line. The promoter's team resealed the window from outside and replaced the shaft joint in the fourth week, and the September rain found nothing. Had it not, the complaint file was ready.

What the filings can add, and what they cannot#

No filing will tell you why your wall is wet. MahaRERA records what the promoter filed, not how the plaster behaves in rain, and a ReraGenie page or report is only as good as that record. What the record does supply is the part of the case file that is easiest to get wrong.

The Rs 499 ReraGenie buyer report for a covered Maharashtra project includes the project's filed documents as a ZIP, so the occupancy certificate that dates your clock, where one is filed, and the approvals your engineer will want arrive together. It sets out the complaints and cases already filed against the project in plain words, with case numbers, which tells a society whether other buyers have already gone to MahaRERA over this project and gives it numbers to cite. And its free 90-day project watch emails you when the project's filing changes while your complaint runs. See what the buyer report contains.

The one-line summary#

Section 14(3) gives you five years to tell the promoter and gives the promoter 30 days to fix it free: date the defect, write early and in the right name, let the society carry what belongs to the building, have an engineer name the cause, and take the file to MahaRERA when the 30 days pass.

Methodology and sources#

• Law: RERA Act 2016, sections 14(3) and 11(4)(a); model agreement clause 7.4, annexed to rule 10(1) of the Maharashtra RERA Rules, 2017; MahaRERA Order 38/2022 of 13 December 2022; MahaRERA General (Amendment) Regulations, 2024.
• Orders, from published reports, parties not named: Pune seepage, 2 January 2026, and the terrace case (LiveLaw); Pune leakage, and Kiwale, 19 May 2026 (Punekar News); MHADA's Pune board (LiveLaw).
• Data: MahaRERA, October 2024 to July 2025 (Free Press Journal) and 2025, announced 5 January 2026 (Outlook Money, Homes India Magazine); Central Advisory Council meeting of 4 September 2025 (Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs).

This article is educational and not legal advice. For a dispute, consult a lawyer who practices before your state's RERA.