Every industry eventually gets its rating: bonds, restaurants, airlines, sellers on marketplaces. Maharashtra real estate's was announced in August 2023: a half-yearly grade for every new project, computed from the promoter's own filings, with the first grades due from April 2024. None was published. By November 2024 the scheme had been shelved, after developers opposed it and a senior MahaRERA official said the RERA Act gave the authority no power to grade. The rating never arrived. The scrutiny it described did, because every input it named is already on your public filing, and the people who decide whether to buy from you, lend to you or compete with you can read those inputs without waiting for anyone's score.
Key takeaways
- MahaRERA's Circular No. 46/2023 of 28 August 2023 designed half-yearly grades for projects registered after January 2023, with the first window covering October 2023 to March 2024 and grades due from April 2024.
- No grade was published. In November 2024 a senior MahaRERA official said the scheme would not proceed, because the RERA Act does not empower the authority to grade projects.
- The four snapshots the matrix named, overview, technical, financial and legal, are all operational: filing punctuality, work-versus-time pace, audit cleanliness, and the complaint and warrant record.
- With no grade to lean on, the filing record itself is what buyers, lenders and competitors compare, so a long clean series is the asset the grade was meant to certify.
What the matrix was designed to read
| Snapshot | What it was designed to read | What the promoter controls |
|---|---|---|
| Overview | Promoter details and project type | Accurate, current particulars of the promoter and the project |
| Technical | Quarterly filing discipline, work completed against time elapsed, bookings, the quality certificate, extensions, society formation and conveyance | Filing dates, construction pace, a realistic completion date, timely society formation |
| Financial | Financial progress, the CA's audit report and its qualifications, encumbrances, penalties | Account discipline, a clean annual audit, declared charges kept current |
| Legal | Complaints, warrants, court and NCLT proceedings | Settling early, and complying with orders before a warrant issues |
The snapshots are as MahaRERA's Circular No. 46/2023 set them out. Read the inputs again slowly, because the strategic fact hides in their ordinariness: every one is either a filing you control (QPRs, certificates, audits), an execution outcome you manage (work completed against time elapsed, society formation), or a dispute record you influence (complaints, warrants). There is no branding input, no size input, no advertising input. The matrix was designed as a mirror held up to operations, and shelving the score did not take the mirror away: the filings it would have read are still public, quarter by quarter.
What happened to the score
The circular set the first assessment window as October 2023 to March 2024, with grades to follow from April 2024. The first publication was put back, and in November 2024 a senior MahaRERA official told the Times of India that grading would not proceed, because the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 does not give the authority the power to grade projects; the decision followed opposition from developers. No grade has been published since, and no project page carries one.
What did not change is who reads the record. Buyers open the project page before a site visit. Lenders read the quarterly filings before a tranche. Channel partners check which projects they can sell without a complaint following them. Competitors run the same routine on you that you can run on them. Each of them is computing a private version of the grade, with weights of their own, every quarter rather than every six months. How a lender can still use the matrix's rubric, without any grades to read, is set out in the grading matrix as a credit input.
An analogy: the credit bureau that never opened
Imagine a credit bureau that published its scoring formula and then never opened, while every lender kept a copy of your repayment ledger. You would never see a score, and nobody would need one: each lender would apply the formula to the ledger in front of it. That is where Maharashtra's promoters stand. The formula is in Circular No. 46/2023, the ledger is the public filing, and the early-mover asset is the one it would have been under a published grade: a long clean series before your competitors start theirs.
Running the matrix on yourself
The playbook is unglamorous because the matrix is:
- Never miss a filing date. The technical snapshot was designed to read punctuality directly, and enforcement sweeps read it anyway: in May 2026 MahaRERA issued show-cause notices to 8,212 projects for one missed quarterly deadline.
- Keep work-versus-time honest from day one. The matrix compares percent complete against percent of timeline elapsed, which silently punishes the optimistic registration date. A realistic declared date also keeps you out of the extension queue, where each application puts the promoter's own reason for the delay on the public record.
- Protect the audit. Form 5 qualifications and financial encumbrances fed the financial snapshot; the three-account discipline is what keeps that column clean.
- Manage the complaint record like the asset it is. Settle the settleable early (Maharashtra's conciliation forum exists for this), and comply with orders before warrants issue, because a recovery warrant stays on the record long after the dispute is over.
- Form the society on time. A line item promoters habitually defer, and one the matrix singled out by name.
Extensions show how ordinary the slipped calendar has become, which is exactly why the reason filed with one matters more than the fact of it.
Source: MahaRERA's approvals for 2025-26, as reported in 2026
For every nine new registrations the regulator approved in 2025-26, it approved about eight extensions. A buyer comparing two delayed projects is no longer comparing a delayed one with a punctual one; they are comparing two reasons, and a reason that changes from one application to the next reads worse than a delay that was explained once and then met.
Treat each quarter's filing date like a results day. Two weeks before it, audit your own project page against the four snapshots and fix what is fixable: an unfiled certificate, an unformed society, an unanswered complaint. Nobody grades the record on a fixed date any more, which means it is read on every date, by whoever opens the page.
The commercial compounding
Anita Rao (illustrative, as ever) ran the comparison across her firm's two comparable Pune projects: one with an unbroken filing series, one carrying a missed quarter and an old warrant. Same brand, same specification, one micro-market apart. The clean project's walk-ins converted measurably better once the sales team put the filing history into the first meeting, not because buyers understood the matrix, but because the competitor across the road could not match the artefact. A clean public filing is the one marketing claim no agency can write for you.
The mirror works in both directions, of course. The same filings are exactly what buyers are taught to read, and reading the shelved scorecard as a buyer is now a ten-minute check on any project page, so expect a well-prepared buyer to arrive with the four snapshots already run. One caution belongs in every sales brief: a "MahaRERA grade" quoted in a brochure or a pitch is a claim the regulator never made, and advertising under MahaRERA has rules of its own. ReraGenie's Rs 2,999 project analysis assembles the filed record the matrix would have read for any Maharashtra project, set against the district and the surrounding market: the gap since the last filing against the district's median, the extensions filed with the promoter's own reasons and the share of nearby registrations that have extended, the cases and complaints on record, and how far delivery dates slip around it. Run it on your own project before the sales team quotes it, or on a rival's before you position against it.
The one-line summary
MahaRERA shelved the grade but not the scrutiny: file on time, pace the work, keep the audit and the complaint record clean, form the society, and the public record does the job the half-yearly score was meant to do, every quarter.
Methodology and sources
- The grading design: MahaRERA Circular No. 46/2023, 28 August 2023, introducing the MahaRERA Grading Matrix for projects registered post January 2023, assessed every six months, with a first period of 1 October 2023 to March 2024.
- The shelving: a senior MahaRERA official to the Times of India, 6 November 2024, as reported by PropNewsTime.
- Approvals: MahaRERA's figures for 2025-26, as reported in 2026: 10,379 approvals, including 4,204 new registrations and 3,687 extensions.
- Enforcement: MahaRERA show-cause notices to 8,212 projects, May 2026.
- Nothing in this article reproduces or estimates any project's grade, because none has been published.
Evaluating a micro-market or a land parcel?
The ReraGenie project analysis reads the filings around your parcel: supply, absorption and promoter records. Rs 2,999 per project; the area market report is a flat Rs 2,999 per pincode.
See the project analysis