Every MahaRERA advertisement carries a registration number and, since 2023, a QR code. Scanning it is the easy part. Knowing what to look at once the project page opens, and what should make you close your chequebook, is the part nobody teaches. This is the complete portal check, the one we would run for family.
Key takeaways
- Search by registration number on the official portal, never from a link or PDF the seller provides; match the project name, phase and promoter entity exactly.
- The five-point read: registration status, promoter entity, completion date plus extensions, latest QPR, uploaded documents.
- Phases are separate registrations: the tower being sold to you must be inside the registration you checked.
- Two or more quarters of missing progress reports is a walk-away signal regardless of how alive the registration looks.
Before you start
You need ten minutes, the registration number from the ad or brochure, and one rule: type the portal address yourself (maharera.maharashtra.gov.in). Never verify through a link, screenshot or PDF certificate the sales office sends, because documents are easy to fabricate and the live portal is not. This walkthrough sits inside a larger discipline covered in what MahaRERA is and the 12-document checklist; here we do just the portal, properly.
The seven steps
- 1
Search by registration number
Exact-match the number from the advertisement. What you should see: one project. Red flag: number not found, or it resolves to a different project name than the one being sold.
- 2
Match name, phase and address
Project name, phase and survey number must match what you are buying. Red flag: you are being sold Phase 2 on Phase 1's registration; every phase is a separate legal project.
- 3
Read the status and validity
Healthy answers: registered and in validity, extended with a fresh date, or completed with OC. Red flags: lapsed, revoked, or expired with no extension on record.
- 4
Note the promoter's legal entity
The exact company or LLP name on the certificate is who your agreement must be with. Red flag: the agreement draft names a different entity than the registration.
- 5
Read the dates
The promised completion date the promoter declared, plus every extension. Red flag: multiple extensions already taken on a project still years from finishing.
- 6
Open the latest quarterly update
Check its date first, then bookings and construction percentage. Red flag: the newest QPR is two or more quarters old, or construction has not moved while bookings climbed.
- 7
Scan the documents and litigation tabs
Title report, approvals, commencement certificate, Form 1/2/3 certificates, and disclosed litigation. Red flag: sparse uploads on a project that has been selling for years.
An analogy: reading the label, not the packaging
Food packaging is marketing; the nutrition label is law. The brochure is packaging. The MahaRERA page is the label: standardized, sworn, and printed in the same format for every project in Maharashtra, which is exactly what makes comparison possible. Nobody chooses between two products by comparing their photography, and the portal exists so nobody has to choose between two towers that way either.
What each red flag actually means
Not found or mismatched: marketing an unregistered project above the exemption size is straightforwardly illegal, and quoting another phase's number is the industry's oldest sleight of hand. Either way, the seller began the relationship with a misrepresentation.
Lapsed or revoked: the registration died. MahaRERA publishes lapsed and deregistered lists precisely because these projects keep getting marketed; a lapsed project cannot lawfully sell you anything until revived. It is not a rare case: in ReraGenie's analysis of the 55,995 published MahaRERA projects as updated on 29 September 2026, 13,941 are lapsed, 500 de-registered and 81 revoked, so about one registration in four that a search turns up is no longer live. What each status actually means, and why to check the lists separately from the project page, is decoded in lapsed, revoked, deregistered.
Source: ReraGenie analysis of 55,995 published MahaRERA projects, as updated on 29 September 2026; the 7 under abeyance or filing no status are not shown
Entity mismatch: brand names build nothing; entities do. Your rights attach to the entity on the certificate, and the litigation history check runs on that exact name.
Serial extensions and silent quarters: the two earliest symptoms in the stall sequence. One extension is common and two are not: of the same 55,995 projects, 13,603 (24.3%) have applied for at least one extension and 4,421 (7.9%) for two or more. The reading method for progress reports, healthy trendlines versus sick ones, is its own skill, taught in the QPR guide, and the exact Maharashtra filing dates tell you precisely when "silent" starts.
The portal shows today's snapshot only. Old filings get overwritten, so you cannot see whether the completion date quietly moved last year or whether bookings were restated. If your decision hinges on history, that history has to come from a record kept at the time: ReraGenie has recorded every covered project's filed figures as they change since July 2026, and anything earlier survives only where someone saved it.
Priya and Arjun run it in a sales office
Names and numbers in this story are illustrative. Priya and Arjun ran the check from a sales-office sofa in Baner while the manager fetched coffee. Registration number: found. Phase: matched. Status: valid to December 2027. Entity: matched the draft allotment letter. Dates: no extensions. Latest QPR: filed three weeks ago, construction 45 percent, bookings 61 percent. Documents: title report, CC and eight quarters of certificates present. Ten minutes, and the conversation that followed was different: they asked why construction ran one quarter behind the promoter's own milestone plan, and got a straight answer about a monsoon-delayed basement. The manager later admitted almost no visitor ever mentions the portal.
After the portal: two checks the page cannot do
The portal validates the project as filed. It cannot tell you whether the promoter's other projects delivered on time, which lives in the track record method, and it cannot show you the land's registered history, which is the encumbrance certificate's job. The page will not show a grade: MahaRERA designed one in 2023 and shelved it in 2024 before publishing any, so a missing grade says nothing about the project, though its four-part scorecard is still a useful order in which to read the page. A clean portal page plus those two checks is a genuinely verified purchase.
The manual version of all this, run across the portal and the promoter's whole portfolio, is what the Rs 499 ReraGenie buyer report automates for any covered Maharashtra project: registration status, the promised date and every extension, construction and bookings against the district's pace, the promoter's delivery record and disclosed litigation, each as a fact with its filing date. Check one project by hand with this guide; when you are comparing three, sign up on ReraGenie and let the report do the assembling.
The one-line summary
Type the portal address yourself, exact-match the number, read status, entity, dates, the latest QPR and the documents, and treat silence, mismatches and serial extensions as answers in themselves. Ten minutes on the label beats any hour with the packaging. The number quoted to you is not always the number for the flat you are buying: phase-wise registrations, expired numbers and other listing tricks covers how that gap is engineered. You do not have to type the number at all if the ad carries its QR code, which by law it must: the QR code on every ad.
Evaluating a project right now?
The ReraGenie buyer report reads every filing for one project and sets out the red flags, the checks that came back clear and what to verify before you book, each fact with its filing date. Rs 499, one time.
See the buyer report