Does the land carry a loan? What MahaRERA's declared charges show about project land mortgages

Two in three projects on the MahaRERA register have never told anyone whether their land carries a loan. Of 56,068 published registrations, 38,559 return nothing at all for the encumbrance declaration, the part of the filing where a promoter states whether a lender holds a charge over the project. Of the 17,509 that did answer, 2,662 declared one. A project land mortgage is ordinary construction finance, and on its own it says nothing bad about a project. What it does is put a lender between you and a clean title, and the filing is the one place a buyer can see who that lender is.

What the declaration is, and what it is not#

The encumbrance declaration is the part of a MahaRERA filing where a promoter answers whether the project land or its buildings carry a charge, and if so names the lender, the type of security and the amount secured. It records secured lending against the project. It does not record equity, a parent company's bonds raised elsewhere, unsecured loans or money a promoter's group borrowed at its own level, so a project that answers "no charge" can still be financed by debt; it simply is not secured on this land.

The reason a buyer should care is mechanical rather than moral. A lender with a charge over the land has a claim on it until the loan is repaid. Your flat sits on that land, so before your title is clean, the lender has to release your flat from the charge, normally through a no-objection letter at the agreement stage or a release when the loan is closed. Section 11(4)(h) of the RERA Act adds one protection: once your agreement for sale is executed, a charge the promoter creates afterwards cannot affect your rights. It says nothing about a charge that was already there.

Who answers: a question old filings never faced#

The silence is mostly age. Only 960 of the 14,736 projects registered in 2017 answered, against 3,025 of the 3,057 registered so far in 2026. Most older registrations simply carry no answer, and nothing in that silence tells you the land was free on the day they were filed. For a buyer, that means the declaration is most useful on exactly the projects most buyers are looking at, the recent ones, and least useful on an older project, where the title report and a CERSAI search have to do the work alone.

How common a charge is, district by district#

Among projects that answered, a charge is declared on 15.2 percent. The rate is not the same across the state.

The pattern follows land values and project sizes: the dearer the land and the larger the tower, the more likely the promoter has borrowed against it. Each figure is a share of the projects that answered in that district, never of the whole district, because counting the silent majority as uncharged would describe a market with almost no secured lending in it.

There is a second pattern, and it matters more to a buyer. Among answering projects, the charged share holds between 15 and 20 percent for every registration year from 2017 to 2024, then falls to 13.8 percent for 2025 registrations and 10.5 percent for 2026. The likeliest reading is timing rather than thrift: a project often borrows after it is registered, once construction is under way. A clean declaration on a new registration is a statement about the day it was filed.

Who holds the charges#

Lenders are classified here by their name, which is our reading and not a filed field. A project with two lenders of different kinds counts under both.

Three of these deserve a sentence each. A debenture trustee on the charge usually means the promoter raised money by issuing debentures, with the trustee holding the security on behalf of investors the filing does not name. An asset reconstruction company on the charge means the original loan was sold on as a stressed asset; it is a fact about the lender's book, not a verdict on the building, but it is the one line in the declaration that changes the questions worth asking. And SWAMIH is the government's last-mile fund for stalled housing, which by the Ministry of Finance's account had completed about 61,000 homes by December 2025: its presence means the project needed last-mile money to finish.

Where the details are filed, they are unusually complete for RERA data: 2,935 of 2,982 charge rows carry a usable amount, and the median charged project declares about Rs 37.6 crore of secured lending. For scale, Bank of Baroda Research, analysing RBI data in September 2026, put banks' outstanding commercial real estate credit at about Rs 6.7 lakh crore in July 2026, against about Rs 1 lakh crore with non-bank lenders, and found banks had added Rs 42,142 crore of it between March and July. Commercial real estate is the RBI category under which loans to developers are classified.

One more line in the declaration is worth reading. On 724 of the 2,646 projects that file charge details, 27.4 percent, at least one charge is marked as not appearing in the CERSAI central registry. There are innocent explanations, from timing to the type of security, so it is a question for a lawyer rather than a warning, but it is a question worth asking before you pay.

An analogy: the bank's name on a car's papers#

When a car is bought on a loan, the lender's name is endorsed on its registration certificate. You can buy that car, but until the loan is closed and the lender issues its no-objection certificate, the lender's claim travels with it. A project's land works the same way. The charge is the endorsement; the lender's no-objection letter for your flat, and in time its release, is what takes your flat out from under it.

Meera reads two declarations#

Meera (illustrative, as our stories always are) had narrowed her Thane search to two projects. The first had answered the declaration and named a housing finance company with a charge of about Rs 40 crore. She asked the promoter for the lender's no-objection letter for her flat and for the agreement to record the charge and the payment account; both arrived within the week. The second had never answered at all. Her lawyer ran a CERSAI search against the land and read the encumbrance section of the legal title report, which was the only way to learn what the filing would not say. She kept both projects on the list, and knew which one she understood. Names and numbers in this story are illustrative.

What this means for you#

• A charge is declared. Ask for the lender's no-objection letter for your flat before you sign, check that your agreement records the charge, and pay only into the project's designated account, as the 70 percent rule and the three bank accounts explain. If your own home loan is from a different lender, your bank will want that letter too.
• "No charge" is declared. That is the promoter's statement, not a title search. Read the legal title report and run the checks in CERSAI and the title report and the encumbrance certificate.
• Nothing is declared. Treat the silence as an unanswered question, not a clean answer, and do the same independent checks.
• An asset reconstruction company holds the charge. Ask how the loan reached it, whether the project's finance has been restructured, and how sold flats are being released. It is also worth reading five filing signals that precede a stalled project before you decide.

What the report does with the declaration#

The Rs 499 ReraGenie buyer report answers "is the land mortgaged?" as one question rather than four scattered facts: it reads the promoter's declaration, names the lender and the amount filed, notes whether the charge is marked as appearing in CERSAI, and sets that beside what the legal title report concludes and the exceptions it attaches. Where the holder is an asset reconstruction company, it says so in plain words. The free project page shows the declaration itself, lender and amount, for any registration that filed one, so you can check a shortlist before deciding which project deserves a report.

Methodology and sources#

• Charge figures: ReraGenie analysis of 56,068 published MahaRERA registrations, as updated on 3 October 2026. "Answered" means the encumbrance declaration returned a record; "declared" means the promoter's flag or at least one charge row asserts a charge (2,662 projects, of which 2,646 file charge details and 16 declare without naming a lender). District and year shares use answering projects as the denominator.
• Kinds of charge holder are read from the filed lender name, not from any filed category. Amounts outside Rs 1 lakh to Rs 10,000 crore are excluded as filing errors; 47 of 2,982 rows were excluded this way.
• Commercial real estate credit: Bank of Baroda Research, analysis of RBI sectoral credit data for July 2026, reported in September 2026.
• SWAMIH completions: Ministry of Finance and government data, December 2025.
• Law: Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016, section 11(4)(h).