Khata Transfer After You Buy: Who Issues It, and What It Does Not Prove

Registration is the loud part of buying a home. Khata transfer is the quiet part that happens afterwards, and it is where a surprising number of buyers get stuck — usually because nobody told them it was their job.

What a khata is, in one sentence

A khata is an account of a property in the register a local body keeps for assessing and collecting property tax: who is assessed, for what property, at what measurement. It is a revenue record of a municipal kind. It is not a title document, and no version of it — A khata, e-khata, a panchayat Form 9 — becomes one.

Which body issues it, and why that depends on the tier

Karnataka runs three tiers of local body, and each keeps its own register under its own statute. The first thing to establish about an address is which one governs it.

On the Sarjapur Road corridor the tier changes from node to node and does not follow the road. Ask which body has jurisdiction over the specific survey number before you ask anything else, because the answer decides which office you go to, which application you file and what the document you receive is even called.

The documents a transfer application rests on

The exact form and channel differ by body, and increasingly the application is filed through the body’s own online property system rather than over a counter. What the application rests on is broadly constant.

• The registered sale deed in your name — the instrument, with its registration endorsements, not a draft or a photocopy of a draft.
• The previous khata or panchayat record, showing the property as it stands in the register today.
• Tax paid receipts up to date, in the seller’s name for the period before the sale.
• An encumbrance certificate for the period the body specifies, which is how it satisfies itself that the transfer it is being asked to record is the latest one.
• The approved plan and, for a completed building, the occupancy or completion certificate — the documents that establish the property is one the body can lawfully assess as built.
• Identity documents for the applicant, and the authority of anyone applying on their behalf.

Where each of those actually fits

The sale deed is the event. The application asks the body to update its register because ownership changed, and the registered instrument is the proof that it did — which is why an unregistered agreement will not support a transfer. Section 49 of the Registration Act, 1908 provides that a document required to be registered and not registered shall not affect the immovable property comprised in it.

The tax receipts are the body’s own interest. It is being asked to move an account, and it will not move one carrying arrears; the liability sits on the property in practice, so a clean receipt before transfer protects the buyer more than it protects the office.

The plan sanction and the completion or occupancy certificate answer a different question again: whether what is standing on the land is what was permitted. A body that assesses an unauthorised structure has recorded a building it may separately be obliged to act against, which is why these documents are asked for and why a property that cannot produce them stalls at this step.

Apartment khata: what changes when you own one unit

For an apartment the land is one parcel and the building is many properties. The developer holds the khata for the land during construction. After the building is complete and the units are conveyed, the register has to be broken into individual accounts — one for each apartment, each carrying its undivided share in the land.

Two things determine whether that goes smoothly. First, the conveyance to you: section 17(1) of the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 requires the promoter to execute a registered conveyance of the apartment along with the undivided proportionate title in the common areas. Second, the declaration that constitutes the building as apartments — section 2 of the Karnataka Apartment Ownership Act, 1972 applies that Act to property whose owner submits it to the Act by executing and registering a Declaration, and where a building has been so submitted, the individual apartment is the unit the register recognises.

The practical consequence for a buyer is simple: your khata depends on paperwork the promoter completes at the building level. Ask, before you buy, what the promoter has undertaken to do about the khata for individual units and when — in writing, in the agreement, rather than as a verbal assurance at the site office.

How long it takes, and what to do meanwhile

Time varies by body and by how complete the file is; the honest answer is that a clean application moves and an incomplete one waits. What matters is that you do not sit idle in between.

1. Keep paying property tax on the property, and keep the receipts. A gap in payment during the transfer is a problem you created.
2. Keep the acknowledgement or application number the body issued. It is what you quote when you follow up, and it is the evidence that you applied on a date.
3. Track the mutation of the revenue record separately where the property is land — that is a different register, kept by a different department, and it does not update because the khata did.
4. Follow up in writing. A phone call leaves no record that the file was pending on a date.

Read the khata you are issued

When the document comes back, check it rather than filing it. The name and its spelling, the property description, the measurement recorded, the ward or panchayat, and the assessment particulars all have to match the registered deed and the record you applied on. An error introduced here propagates: it will appear on every tax receipt, and it will surface again as a discrepancy the next time the property changes hands. Correcting it now is an application; correcting it in ten years is an argument.

Charges: named authority, no figure printed

Each body publishes its own fee for recording a transfer, and the basis differs by tier. We do not print the figure here, for the same reason we do not print rates anywhere on this site: a number typed into an article is correct on the day it is typed and wrong the day the body revises it, and a reader who has been given a stale figure has been given something worse than nothing. Ask the body that will issue your khata, or read its published schedule, and take the number from the source that can change it.

The one thing a fresh khata still does not prove

It does not prove you own the property. It proves the body will now send the tax demand to you.

That is worth having. It is also the beginning of a different set of questions, because a khata can be issued on a property whose title chain has a gap, whose land was never lawfully converted, or whose building exceeded what was sanctioned. The register records an assessment; it does not audit the file behind it.

Which is why a khata sits alongside the registered instruments, the record of rights and the approvals rather than replacing them — the sequence those documents come in is the buyer guide, each of them is defined in the glossary, and the khata questions buyers ask most often are answered in the legal section of the FAQ.