Parking: what a builder can sell you, and what was never theirs

Somewhere in the cost sheet, between the flat and the taxes, there is usually a line for parking. It might be Rs 3 lakh, it might be Rs 15 lakh in a Mumbai tower, and it is one of the few items on the sheet that the Supreme Court has already ruled a builder cannot sell you as separate property. The ruling is from 2010. The line item is still there.

What the Court actually held#

In Nahalchand Laloochand Pvt Ltd v Panchali Co-operative Housing Society Ltd, decided on 31 August 2010, the Supreme Court considered whether a promoter could sell stilt car parking spaces as separate premises under the Maharashtra Ownership of Flats Act.

It held that they could not. A stilt parking space is not a "flat" within the meaning of MOFA, and it is not a "garage" either. It forms part of the common areas and facilities of the building, which are intended for the use and benefit of all the flat purchasers. Because they are common areas, they cannot be carved out and sold to a member or to an outsider as separate property.

The Court did not say parking is free. It said the promoter's lawful route is to recover the cost of the common areas and facilities from the flat purchasers in proportion to their carpet area, as part of what the building costs, rather than to sell individual bays as individual assets. The distinction sounds technical and decides everything: a cost recovered in proportion is a shared burden, while a bay sold for a price is a promise of exclusivity the promoter had no title to give.

Why it is still being sold#

Three reasons, and none of them is that the ruling is unclear.

Because buyers pay. A parking bay in a city where street parking is a daily fight is worth real money to a purchaser, and a purchaser who wants one is not usually in the mood to litigate about whether it may be offered.

Because the loss surfaces late. The builder's allotment letter works perfectly until the society is formed and starts allotting for itself. That can be five years after the payment, by which time the person who sold it has left, and the dispute is with neighbours rather than with the promoter.

Because the alternative is not obviously better. A buyer who refuses to pay does not thereby get a bay. They get a place in a queue that a society will run later, and the buyer who paid is standing in the same queue with a letter.

That last point is the honest one, and it is why this article does not end with "refuse to pay". It ends with knowing what you have bought, which is a cost contribution and a hope, not a title.

The check the filings cannot do for you#

This is the one place where our own data disappoints, and it is worth stating plainly rather than implying the register answers more than it does.

MahaRERA does collect parking. Across the 55,733 published projects on our September 2026 read, the parking block appears on 94.8 percent and 82.3 percent report at least one non-zero slot count, together disclosing more than 4.2 million parking spaces filed wing by wing and type by type. That is a genuinely large disclosure and it tells you how much parking a project claims to have built.

What it does not tell you is your entitlement. The fields that would record sanctioned allotment per unit exist in the filing and are populated on roughly 1,900 rows in the entire state, which is effectively nil. So the comparison every buyer wants, spaces provided against spaces sanctioned per flat, cannot be made from the register at all. Anyone who tells you the RERA filing proves your parking entitlement has not looked at the fields.

What the filing does support is a cruder but still useful ratio: total slots filed against sanctioned units in the same project. A tower filing 40 spaces for 120 flats is telling you something about the queue you will be joining, without telling you anything about the rule it was sanctioned under. That is information, and calling it an entitlement would be inventing half of it.

An analogy: the reserved seat that was never the airline's to sell#

If an airline sold you a specific seat, took the money, and then told you at the gate that seating is decided by a committee of passengers formed after boarding, you would understand instantly what had gone wrong. The seat was real, the payment was real, and the seller had no authority over the allocation.

Stilt parking works exactly that way. The bay exists, the money changed hands, and the body that decides who parks there comes into being later and did not make the promise.

Meera's bay, and the neighbour with the same letter#

Meera (illustrative, as our stories always are) paid Rs 6 lakh for a stilt bay and used it without incident for four years. When the society was finally constituted and its first general body took up parking, it did what most do: counted the bays, counted the members, found there were fewer of the first, and resolved to allot by rotation.

She was not the only person in the building holding a builder's letter for that specific bay. Two of them were for the same number, which is not necessarily dishonesty so much as five years of site staff turnover and an allotment plan nobody kept properly. The society had no obligation to honour either.

What she got back was not the bay and not the money. She got a general body that agreed to weight the rotation towards members who could evidence payment to the promoter, which was a compromise it was free to make and free not to. Her own summary was that the Rs 6 lakh had bought her a good argument rather than a parking space, and that she would have paid it anyway, but she would have read the letter first.

What to do before you pay#

• Ask whether the space is stilt, open, or a separately sanctioned closed garage, and get the answer in writing.
• Read the allotment letter for the words "endeavour" and "subject to the society", and understand what they concede.
• Ask how the amount is described in the cost sheet: a common-area cost recovered in proportion is a different thing from a sale of a bay.
• Check the project's filed slot count against its unit count, which is public, and know what queue you are joining.
• Keep the receipt and the letter permanently. If a society ever weights an allotment by who paid, that paper is your evidence.
• If the sum is large enough to matter, take advice before paying rather than after allotment.

Where this fits#

Parking sits inside the larger question of what is common area and what is saleable, which is also where carpet, built-up and super built-up does its work, and inside the promises a promoter makes in the agreement, where the model agreement's load-bearing clauses is the right place to check what your own draft says. When the society does take over allotment, it is doing so under the machinery described in the first twelve months after possession. And if the promoter simply refuses to honour a written commitment, the route is a complaint to MahaRERA.

The one thing the filings do answer#

Not your entitlement, but the promoter's record, which is the better predictor of whether the allotment letter will be honoured in spirit. The Rs 499 ReraGenie buyer report assembles it for a Maharashtra project: the promoter's other registrations and their delivery record, the project's own complaint and litigation history with case numbers, and the parking totals it has actually filed, wing by wing, so you can see the ratio before you are told about it. The project's free page carries the filed parking table at no cost.

The one-line summary#

Stilt and open parking are common areas the Supreme Court held in 2010 cannot be sold separately, the society allots them once it exists, the builder's letter is a hope rather than a title, and the register will tell you how many spaces a project built while never telling you how many are yours.

This article is educational and not legal advice. For a specific parking dispute, consult a lawyer practising in Maharashtra co-operative and property law.