Regulators rarely hand consumers a weapon this direct: since August 2023, every advertisement for a registered Maharashtra project must carry a scannable door to the project's sworn record, placed and sized so you cannot miss it. Most buyers scan it, glance at a government webpage, and close the tab. The two minutes after the scan are where the mandate pays, and this is what to do with them.

Key takeaways

  • Every ad format, hoardings to Instagram, must carry the registration number, MahaRERA website and a scannable QR code (mandate effective 1 August 2023, prominence rules tightened after token compliance).
  • The code lands on the project's sworn filings: status, dates, entity, QPRs, documents, the exact page marketing hopes you will not read.
  • The post-scan routine takes two minutes: status, phase match, entity, dates, latest filing date.
  • A missing, shrunken or unscannable code is itself data: reported penalties run Rs 10,000 to 50,000, and fumbled mechanical compliance predicts fumbled substantive compliance.

Why the mandate exists

Advertising is where projects are at their most fictional, and the regulator's answer was not to police adjectives but to staple the facts to them: number, website and QR code on everything, and, after a first wave of six-point grey fonts and decorative unscannable squares, prominence rules, font at least as large as the ad's biggest contact details, code in the top right, high contrast. The mandate covers agents' promotions too, so your broker's WhatsApp forward is inside the rules, not beside them.

An analogy: the QR code is the emergency exit map bolted to the hotel room door. Nobody books a hotel for the map, but its absence, or a map for a different building, tells you everything about the management before anything goes wrong.

The two minutes after the scan

From hoarding to verdict, standing on the footpath
  1. 1

    Read where you landed

    The code must open the project's page on the official portal. A landing on the builder's own website, or a PDF, is not compliance; type the portal yourself and search the number instead.

  2. 2

    Status and validity

    Registered and current, or everything else on the hoarding is moot, per the status decoder.

  3. 3

    Phase and tower match

    The registration the code opens must contain the units being advertised, the phase shuffle is the oldest trick in the book.

  4. 4

    Entity and dates

    Promoter entity for your agreement, promised completion date, extension history.

  5. 5

    Latest filing's date

    A QPR filed on schedule, or silence, and silence outranks the ad's confidence.

Each step has a full guide behind it, the portal check, the status decoder, the QPR calendar, but the footpath version above catches the majority of problems before you have given the sales office your number.

Reading the code's quality as a signal

The enforcement record says outright omission is now rare; degraded compliance is common, codes too small, low-contrast, printed over textures, or leading to the flagship phase instead of the one on sale. Treat degradation as disclosure. A promoter who will not spend a designer's hour on a mechanical legal requirement, with penalties of Rs 10,000 to 50,000 per violation and their name in the order, is demonstrating exactly how their compliance calendar runs behind the hoarding. Meanwhile the promoters with clean records increasingly do the opposite, print "scan and verify us" above the code, because their landing page is eight quarters of on-time filings. The mandate quietly sorts the market into projects that want to be read and projects that hope they will not be, and the sorting is visible from a moving car.

Meera's bus-stop shortlist

Meera (illustrative, as ever) built her Thane shortlist without visiting a single sales office: five hoardings on her commute, five scans across a week. Two codes opened current registrations with fresh filings, straight to the shortlist. One opened a phase that did not contain the advertised tower. One landed on a lapsed registration wearing last year's confidence. One did not scan at all, twice, in good light. Three eliminations for the price of standing at a bus stop, and the two survivors earned the deeper work: documents, track record, site visits.

Tip

Screenshot what you scan. The ad, the landing page and the date make a tidy evidence trio if the marketing's claims and the filings ever diverge into a complaint, because misleading advertisement is itself an actionable ground.

The scan gets you the project's current page; the Rs 499 ReraGenie buyer report adds what the page cannot show, the archived filing history, the promoter's record across projects, and locality benchmarks, for any covered Maharashtra project. Scan first, sign up on ReraGenie for the two that survive.

The one-line summary

The law bolted a door to the sworn record onto every advertisement: walk through it for two minutes, phase, status, entity, dates, latest filing, and let the code's own quality, scannable or ornamental, tell you about the people who printed it.

Evaluating a project right now?

The ReraGenie buyer report reads every filing for one project and hands you the verdict, the risks and the questions to ask the builder. Rs 499, one time.

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