How to read a RERA filing without being misled

A RERA filing is not a description of a project. It is a set of declarations a promoter made to a state authority on a particular day, plus whatever that authority chose to publish. Almost every mistake people make reading one comes from treating the second thing as the first.

The registration number is the only identity that means anything

Project names are not unique and never have been. Gujarat's register alone carries fourteen projects called some version of “Om Residency”. The registration number is issued by one authority, is unique within that state, and is the only string that identifies a project without ambiguity. If you are checking a project, check the number — and check it on the state's own portal, which every project page on Horizon names and links.

A promised completion date is a promise, not a schedule

The possession date on a filing is the date the promoter declared at registration. It is the most-filed fact in the whole register — more than 98% of records carry one — and it is also the one most likely to have moved since.

Some registers publish a revised date alongside the original, which is unusual and valuable: it means the original promise and its formal revision both survive in public. Where a revision exists, the distance between the two dates is on the record and we count it. Where no revision exists, that is not evidence the date was met. It may simply mean the promoter never filed one.

“No complaints” is usually not a finding

This is the single most misread thing in Indian real-estate data. Four of the twenty-two registers Horizon holds publish a complaints count against each project. The other eighteen publish nothing at all.

Horizon shows an empty complaints section only where the authority publishes one and it is genuinely empty. Where the authority publishes nothing, the section is absent and says so. The national picture is here.

Approval is approval of a plan — not of a building

A planning permit means an authority sanctioned the drawings. It is not evidence the thing was built to them. The document that certifies that is an occupancy or completion certificate, and most RERA registers do not carry it at all. A handful do — Gujarat files a building-use permission, Assam and Haryana file occupancy certificates — and where one exists Horizon shows it. Where none exists, the record says the register holds none.

The declared cost is a build cost, not a price

Where a register carries a project cost, it is the promoter's declared cost of land plus construction at registration. It is not a sale price, not a per-square-foot rate, and not a valuation. Only some registers carry it at all, and Horizon never converts it into a price, because the arithmetic that would do so is a guess.

The short version

• Check the registration number, not the name.
• Read a date as a promise made on a day, and look for whether it was revised.
• Never read an absent section as a clean one — ask whether that register publishes it at all.
• A sanctioned plan is not a finished building.
• A declared cost is not a price.

Horizon exists to make those distinctions visible rather than to resolve them for you. Every field on a project page is either a filed fact with its source named, or an explicit statement that the register holds nothing there.