The three-account regime and lender security: who really controls the cash

Ask a real estate credit committee who controls a project's cash and the answers usually name the promoter, the lender's escrow or the debenture trustee. For a Maharashtra project registered since 1 July 2024, the first answer is none of them. MahaRERA's bank account order routes every rupee a buyer pays through three accounts in one bank, and forbids a lender any lien over two of them. Structuring security without mapping those accounts is structuring around an assumption that stopped being true. So is the opposite assumption, that the 70 percent can never reach a lender. Here is the regime, what the register shows of it, and the arithmetic.

What the order mandates, and for whom#

The statutory base is section 4(2)(l)(D) of the RERA Act: 70 percent of the amounts realised from allottees goes into a separate account in a scheduled bank, to cover the cost of construction and the land cost, withdrawable in proportion to the project's completion against certificates from an engineer, an architect and a chartered accountant in practice. That rule has applied since 2017. For most of that time Maharashtra left the plumbing to the promoter: collections could land in any account, and the promoter moved 70 percent into the designated one.

MahaRERA's Order No. 56/2024, issued on 27 June 2024 after a discussion paper in March, moved the rule into the bank. For every project registered on or after 1 July 2024, the promoter opens three accounts in one scheduled bank before applying for registration. The Collection account receives every payment from allottees except taxes, stamp duty, registration and pass-through charges, and money leaves it only by the bank's auto-sweep: 70 percent to the Separate account, 30 percent to the Transaction account. Where several promoters share revenue, a Master account sits upstream. The accounts close only at completion, once the occupancy or completion certificate and the architect's Form 4 are with MahaRERA.

Then the clause that concerns this audience. The Collection and Separate accounts, and the Master account where there is one, must be free of any encumbrance, lien, loan and third-party control, meaning control by a lender, bank or financial institution; they may not be escrow accounts; and no authority may attach them except on MahaRERA's order. The Transaction account is not in that list.

What the register shows#

Nearly every registration files its designated bank accounts, and the filing records which of the three exist. Read by quarter of registration, it shows how long the order took to become the norm.

In the order's first quarter one new registration in five showed all three accounts; in the latest, 99.6 percent. Of the 8,759 active registrations dated on or after 1 July 2024, 7,275 show all three accounts and 1,465 still show a single separate account, most of them registered in the order's first year. Before July 2024 the pattern is the mirror image: of the 46,838 published registrations that answer the filing, 46,379, or 99.0 percent, show one designated separate account and nothing else.

For a portfolio the other share matters more: 10,891 of the 19,650 registrations active on the register, 55.4 percent, predate the order and run on the single-account rule its lien bar does not reach. A credit policy written only for the three-account world covers the smaller part of the book.

The money this governs is growing fast. Banks held about Rs 6.7 lakh crore of commercial real estate credit in July 2026, against about Rs 1 lakh crore with NBFCs, and between March and July banks added Rs 42,142 crore of it, 111.3 percent of the segment's net growth, while NBFC credit to the segment contracted by Rs 4,284 crore (Bank of Baroda Research, from RBI data, September 2026). Commercial real estate is the category that carries loans to developers.

The lender's map: what is chargeable#

The Collection account is closed to you. The order bars any lien or lender control over it and forbids it to be an escrow account, and money leaves it only by the bank's sweep. You can read it, through information covenants, but you cannot hold it.

The Separate account is closed to you in the same words, and it is the account most structures misread in both directions. It cannot be charged, escrowed or controlled by a lender. But it can pay one. Rule 5 of Maharashtra's RERA registration rules, as amended in 2019, counts within the cost of construction the principal and interest paid or payable to banks, NBFCs or money-lenders for the project, excluding any loan raised to buy the land or its development rights, and it keeps marketing and brokerage out. So a construction facility can be serviced by a certified withdrawal: the three professionals sign, the certificates go to the account bank, and money released in proportion to completion can carry your principal and interest, provided the loan paid for the building rather than the land. What a lender cannot do is hold the account while it waits.

The Transaction account is where commercial security lives: a charge over it, control over its operation, a waterfall inside it and a debt service reserve funded from it. Money that has been certified and withdrawn from the Separate account has left the protected accounts, and a charge that follows it into the Transaction account is how a construction lender reaches the 70 percent without ever touching it.

Outside the accounts sits conventional collateral, with section 11(4)(h) of the Act running through it: once an agreement for sale is executed the promoter may not mortgage that unit, and a mortgage created regardless does not affect the allottee's rights. Your unsold-inventory collateral shrinks agreement by agreement, lawfully. And at the end sits the Separate account's final balance, which the promoter may withdraw at completion only with MahaRERA's prior written approval, after filing the architect's Form 4, the occupancy or completion certificate, and an affidavit that refunds, penalties and other dues MahaRERA has ordered are discharged. Every buyer claim stands ahead of that release.

The worked example: three coverage numbers#

Illustrative numbers. A project registered in 2025 collects Rs 6 crore a month from allottees. The bank sweeps Rs 4.2 crore to the Separate account and Rs 1.8 crore to the Transaction account. Overheads, marketing and brokerage run Rs 0.9 crore a month, paid from the Transaction side as Rule 5 requires for marketing and brokerage, which leaves Rs 0.9 crore a month there, Rs 10.8 crore a year, as free cash. The lender is asked for a Rs 60 crore construction facility at 12 percent: Rs 7.2 crore of interest a year.

An information memorandum tends to lead with the first line; the honest range is the second and third. Size the facility so the second covers interest on its own, because that is the number you live on in any quarter when the certificates stop, and schedule principal against the third. On these numbers the floor supports the Rs 60 crore. At Rs 80 crore, interest of Rs 9.6 crore would leave the floor at 1.1 times, and the facility would be relying on certificates to pay its interest, which is a bet on the site rather than on the structure.

Two sensitivities complete the model. A sales freeze starves both channels at once: the Transaction stream falls with bookings, and the Separate account can only release what it holds, so a site working on an empty account certifies costs nobody can reimburse. That is why the sales-freeze signal belongs in a lender's quarterly pack. And if possession slips past the registered date, allottees accrue interest at SBI's highest MCLR plus 2 percent, 10.90 percent a year on SBI's June 2026 rates. Model it against the 30 percent stream, not the 70; the final Separate account release waits until refunds and dues MahaRERA has ordered are paid.

The structuring checklist#

1. Check which regime the project is in. A project registered before 1 July 2024 is outside the order, and its bank record on the register will usually show one designated account.
2. Take the charge where the order allows it: over the Transaction account, with control of its operation and the waterfall written inside the 30 percent, overheads allowance first, then debt service, then anything to the sponsor.
3. Get the account bank's written confirmation of the sweep and of your charge, so the plumbing and the security documents describe the same thing.
4. Route certified releases. Provide that money withdrawn from the Separate account is paid into the Transaction account, and check that the CA's Form 3 carries your principal and interest as project borrowing costs.
5. Covenant the Collection account statement monthly. You cannot hold the account, but you can read it, and a borrower collecting outside it is in breach of the order before it is in breach of you.
6. Size the reserve to a sales freeze, not to a payment delay, because the Transaction stream stops when bookings stop.
7. Track sold against mortgaged inventory quarterly. Section 11(4)(h) moves sold units beyond your reach, and the buyer's view of the same accounts explains why that does not reverse.
8. Reconcile the certificate gate before each release, per the tranche procedure, and treat the completion balance as a post-occupancy receipt behind every buyer claim, never as a source during construction.

Why the regime exists, on the public record#

The case for this plumbing is the record of what happens without it. In the Amrapali matter, the Supreme Court's judgment of 23 July 2019 in Bikram Chatterji v. Union of India found that buyers' money had been diverted out of the group's projects, cancelled its RERA registrations and directed NBCC to complete the unfinished homes of more than 42,000 buyers. Much of that diversion predates the RERA Act's 70 percent rule; the rule was the Act's answer to it, and MahaRERA's 2024 order is the answer to the rule being executed in ledgers rather than at the bank. MahaRERA's stated purposes for the order are transparency, accountability, the promoter's financial discipline and the proper use of project funds.

For a lender that is an ally with statutory teeth: money that cannot leave the project except against certified progress is money building your collateral, and the certificates are monitoring evidence at no cost. The promoter's side of the same order is a treasury to operate.

Kavya Menon (illustrative, as ever), who runs real estate credit at a Mumbai NBFC, rewrote her Maharashtra term sheet after the order. Security moved to the Transaction account, the covenants require the monthly Collection account statement, interest cover is computed on Transaction free cash alone, and the first diligence question is the registration date, because it decides which rulebook the project's cash follows. One borrower complained that the lender was duplicating the regulator. That is precisely the design.

The register side of this analysis is what ReraGenie assembles. The Rs 2,999 project analysis sets a project's filed cost against the cost its chartered accountant has certified as incurred, states the spend still to be financed and how far construction runs ahead of or behind sales, and records which of the three designated accounts the filing shows. The free developer pages list every registration a sponsor holds with its current status, so a group carrying lapsed projects elsewhere is visible before you lend, and the free delay interest calculator states the current MCLR-linked rate and the Rule 18 formula behind it.

The one-line summary#

For a Maharashtra project registered since July 2024, buyers' money moves through three accounts in one bank and a lender may hold only the third: charge the Transaction account, size interest cover on its free cash, let certified withdrawals from the 70 percent repay the construction debt they are allowed to repay, and check the registration date before assuming any of it applies.

Methodology and sources#

• MahaRERA Order No. 56/2024 of 27 June 2024, effective 1 July 2024; sections 4(2)(l)(D) and 11(4)(h) of the RERA Act, 2016; Rules 5 and 18 of the Maharashtra RERA registration rules, 2017, Rule 5 as amended in 2019.
• Register figures: ReraGenie analysis of the designated bank account filing of every published MahaRERA registration, as updated on 21 September 2026.
• Commercial real estate credit: Bank of Baroda Research, from RBI sectoral data, reported on 10 September 2026. Amrapali: Supreme Court of India, Bikram Chatterji v. Union of India, 23 July 2019.

This article is educational and not legal advice. For a specific facility, rely on counsel's reading of the order, the rules and the security documents.