Buying a resale property: a due diligence checklist

A resale flat or house feels tangible. You can walk through it. The lift works or it does not. That physical confidence is useful, and it is also how people skip the file. The seller is not a developer with a project account. The seller is an individual, sometimes a family, sometimes a person holding a power of attorney for siblings who live elsewhere. The building being real does not mean the right to sell it is simple.

Start with the person, not the paint

Confirm that the seller named in the latest deed is the person in front of you. If several people bought the property, all of them generally need to convey, or you need a document that explains why one signature is enough. If the owner has died, a sale by one child is not automatically a sale by the estate. Ask for the death certificate and the will or the family arrangement early. Late production of a will is a common way for a deal to stall after money has moved.

Then match the chain. You want the deed by which this seller acquired the property, and enough of the prior chain to see that the person who sold to them had a deed of their own. On a resale out of a project, keep the builder-buyer agreement and the deed from the builder together. Parking, floor rise, and area definitions get lost between those two papers.

The checks that are easy to postpone

• Encumbrance search for a period that includes the seller’s purchase, and a release if any loan appears.
• Society no-dues, and a conversation with the society office-bearers about disputes. They will not always speak freely. Even a refusal is worth recording.
• Property tax and utility bills in a recent period. Ask who will obtain the no-dues letter, and do not leave it as “after registration”.
• Occupancy or completion papers for the building, plus a look at whether this flat’s floor exists on the sanctioned plan. Resale buyers inherit unauthorised floors more often than new-launch buyers, because the deviation is already built and occupied.
• A litigation search on the seller and, if the project has a history of complaints, on the builder. A consumer case about delay may not touch you. A suit for partition will.
• If anyone signs by power of attorney, read the power itself. A general authority to manage a parent’s affairs is not always an authority to sell this flat.

Use the price discussion

Resale negotiation usually happens before the file is complete. That is backwards, but it is common. You can still keep a condition: a sum held back until the society letter, the tax receipt, and the loan release are in hand. Your advocate should draft that condition. The commercial point is simpler. Do not pay a price that assumes a clean file on the day you have only seen a brochure and one deed.

None of this requires you to distrust every seller. Many resales are straightforward once the papers are in a row. The checklist is how you tell those apart from the ones that are only straightforward in conversation. If you want the comparison done against the registers, that is the work of a due diligence review, scoped to the city and the age of the building.