A builder's brochure tells you what they want to say. Their litigation record tells you what courts and regulators made them answer for. Since 2017, that record is largely public: RERA complaints and orders, insolvency filings, consumer cases. Most buyers never read any of it, not because it is secret, but because nobody showed them where to look. This is the where and the how.
Key takeaways
- Every state RERA publishes complaints and orders searchable by promoter and project; the project page also carries mandatory litigation disclosures.
- India's regulators process serious volume: UP RERA alone has received over 60,000 complaints and disposed of about 87 percent; MahaRERA has resolved over 26,000.
- Judge patterns, not single cases: repeat issues, non-compliance with orders and recovery warrants matter far more than one dispute.
- Check the promoter entity, not the brand: insolvency and litigation attach to the specific company that owns your project.
What you need before starting
Fifteen minutes, the project's RERA registration number, and one detail buyers usually skip: the exact legal name of the promoter entity from the RERA page, not the marketing brand. "Sunrise Group" builds nothing; "Sunrise Realty Ventures LLP" does, and its litigation follows that name. Big brands run each project through a separate company, so a clean brand can contain a troubled entity, and vice versa.
The six steps
- 1
Read the litigation disclosures on the project's RERA page
Promoters must disclose pending cases at registration and keep them updated. What you will see: a list, or the word nil. Red flag: a nil that contradicts what the next steps surface.
- 2
Search the state RERA's complaint and order registry
Search by promoter and by project name; read the order PDFs, not just the counts. Red flag: the same grievance, delay, parking, amenities, appearing across many orders.
- 3
Check compliance, not just outcomes
An order in a buyer's favour is only half the story. Look for execution applications and recovery warrants, which mean the builder did not pay until forced. Red flag: multiple recovery proceedings.
- 4
Scan the promoter's other projects on the same portal
Lapsed registrations, projects marked revoked, or serial extensions across the portfolio. Red flag: a promoter whose other project just had its registration revoked.
- 5
Search NCLT and IBBI for insolvency
Search the entity name for corporate insolvency petitions. Red flag: an admitted CIRP against your project's owning company; the moratorium freezes most remedies.
- 6
Run a consumer-forum and e-Courts search
NCDRC and district commission records plus e-Courts by party name catch pre-RERA and parallel cases. Red flag: decades-old land disputes over the project parcel itself.
Each step is free. The only cost is knowing the names to search and reading what comes back.
The scale of what is on record
The complaint machinery is not decorative; it processes serious volume, which is exactly why it is such a rich record of builder behaviour.
Source: Regulator data reported December 2025 to early 2026: UP RERA, MahaRERA (26,011 of 32,377 resolved), HRERA Gurugram
Nationally, regulators had disposed of over 1.47 lakh complaints by September 2025 (Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs data). In 2025 alone MahaRERA resolved 6,045 complaints, more than the 5,073 new ones it received. Every one of those orders names a project and a promoter. That is the database you are reading.
An analogy: the CIBIL report for builders
A lender never asks a borrower "are you trustworthy?"; it pulls a credit report and reads repayment behaviour. A builder's litigation record is the same instrument. One late payment does not sink a credit score, and one complaint does not sink a builder. What sinks both is the pattern: repeated defaults, unresolved dues, forced recovery. Read the record the way a banker reads a bureau report, weighting recent behaviour and repetition over ancient one-offs.
Rohit reads the record from 8,000 kilometres away
Rohit, an NRI buying in Hyderabad without a site visit (illustrative, as ever), shortlisted two projects with near-identical brochures. The filings separated them in an evening. Project one: promoter disclosures listed two pending cases, matching the portal's orders, both possession-delay cases from one older project, both complied with. Project two: disclosures said nil, but the order registry showed eleven complaints across the promoter's portfolio, four with execution applications, and a sister project whose registration had lapsed. Nothing in either brochure hinted at any of this. Rohit booked in project one and kept the order PDFs in his loan file.
Reading orders like an analyst
Four habits turn a pile of PDFs into a judgment:
- Normalize by size. Eleven complaints against a 3,000-unit portfolio is noise; eleven against 200 units is a siren.
- Date the behaviour. Cluster of cases from 2019 that stopped? Possibly a fixed problem. A fresh stream in the last four quarters? A live one.
- Weight the issue type. Delay and refund cases speak to money management; amenity disputes speak to handover quality; title challenges to the land itself are the gravest category, which is also why the encumbrance certificate and document checklist sit beside this check.
- Pair with performance. Litigation history is the rear-view mirror; quarterly filings are the windshield. A promoter with old cases but strong current QPR trendlines can outrank a litigation-free promoter whose construction has quietly stopped. The full method for that side is in how to check a builder's track record.
The single most misread signal: a favourable order the builder ignored. Buyers see "complaint allowed, refund with interest" and relax. Look for what happened next. If the file shows a recovery warrant, the builder made a regulator's order into a collection problem, and your future demand letters will meet the same attitude.
The shortcut, priced at one pizza
Everything above is free and takes an evening per builder if you know all six databases. The Rs 499 ReraGenie buyer report compresses it: for a covered project it returns the promoter's disclosed litigation, complaint and order references, registration status across the promoter's other projects, and the quarterly construction and sales trendlines, in one verdict page with the specific questions to put to the builder. For a buyer like Rohit, comparing two shortlists remotely, that is two reports for less than the cost of one notarised document. If a builder's record is the thing standing between you and a booking, sign up on ReraGenie and read it before the cheque.
The checklist recap
- Exact promoter entity name from the RERA page, not the brand.
- Litigation disclosures on the project page, cross-checked against the order registry.
- Order PDFs read for issue type, dates, compliance and recovery warrants.
- Promoter's other projects: lapsed, revoked, serially extended?
- NCLT/IBBI insolvency search on the owning entity.
- Consumer forum and e-Courts sweep for pre-RERA and land cases.
- Pattern verdict: normalized, dated, weighted, paired with current QPRs.
This article is educational and not legal advice. For a dispute, consult a lawyer who practices before your state's RERA.
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