Glossary

A khata (from the Kannada and Hindi word for an account) is the account the local body keeps for a property so that it can assess and collect property tax. It carries the property's identifiers, its measurements as recorded, and the name of the person the body holds liable. Two documents come out of it: the khata certificate, which states that an account exists in that name, and the khata extract, which sets out the details held in the register.

A property is entered in the main register — the one people call the A-register — where the local body's records show it as assessed on the ordinary footing, with the plan approval, land use and other requirements its records treat as being in order. Properties whose records do not meet those requirements have historically been entered in a separate register instead, which is where the phrase B-Khata comes from.

The distinction that gets lost in every listing portal is that none of this is title. Ownership of immovable property in India passes by a registered instrument — a sale deed — not by a municipal register entry. A khata in your name after a purchase is evidence that the corporation has updated its books following that sale deed; it is not a substitute for the deed, the parent documents or the encumbrance certificate, and no municipal body issues it as one.

The distinction the statute draws is the one buyers most often collapse. An agreement to sell is a promise about a future transfer and a set of obligations attached to it — price, schedule, specification, what happens on default. A sale deed is the transfer. Having signed the first, you have contractual rights against the seller; you do not yet own the property.

For a registered real estate project this document does most of the work. Section 13(1) of the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 bars a promoter from taking more than ten per cent of the cost as an advance payment or application fee without first entering into a written agreement for sale and registering it. The agreement is where the carpet area, the payment plan, the specification and the date for handing over possession are committed, and those are the terms a regulator can later be asked to enforce — which is why what is written into this document matters more than anything said across a sales desk.

The B-register exists because a municipal body has to collect tax on the buildings inside its limits whether or not each of them was built to an approved plan on properly converted land. Entering a property there lets the corporation raise a demand without thereby recording the property as compliant. That is an administrative device, and it is the whole of what the entry does.

This is the term on which we are going to be least precise, deliberately, because precision here would be invented. The practical consequences of a B-register entry — what a bank will lend against it, whether a building plan can be sanctioned for it, and on what terms and under which scheme a property can move to the main register — have been changed by executive orders and government schemes on several occasions, and have been the subject of litigation in the Karnataka High Court. A confident sentence on a web page about the current position is a guess dressed up as an answer, and it will still be sitting on the page after the position has moved again.

What can be said without qualification is the negative. A B-Khata entry does not cure a defect. It does not convert agricultural land, it does not sanction an unapproved plan, it does not regularise a deviation, and it does not create title. If a property is described to you as B-Khata, the correct response is not to price the discount — it is to find out which specific requirement its records do not meet, because that is the thing you would be buying.

For a buyer, the corporation is the body that holds the khata, assesses property tax, sanctions building plans within its limits and issues the certificates that mark the start and end of construction there. None of that overlaps with RERA registration, which is a separate exercise before a separate authority under a separate Act.

The governance of Greater Bengaluru has been the subject of legislative change, including provision for restructuring the corporation and for an overarching authority for the wider area. We are not going to state on this page which body currently has jurisdiction over a given address, how the limits are currently drawn, or what a given entity is currently called, because that is exactly the kind of fact that moves by notification and then leaves a stale sentence behind.

The practical version of that caution: do not infer the authority from the address. The khata itself, the tax receipt and the sanctioned plan each name the body that issued them, and those documents are the answer.

Where BDA has jurisdiction, it is the body whose layout approval and plan sanction a development needs, and BDA-formed layouts are a distinct category of site from privately developed ones. Its remit is planning and development, and the master plan for the area is the instrument through which it works.

Buyers meet the acronym most often in the phrase BDA approved, which is doing a lot of unexamined work in listings. It should mean that the specific layout in question was approved by BDA — a thing that has a document behind it and a date. It is regularly used more loosely, to mean that a property is somewhere near an area BDA administers.

The area of operation and the division of responsibility between the development authority, the municipal corporation and the wider metropolitan authority are set by statute and by notification, and have changed. Do not treat the split as fixed.

Plotted layouts on the outskirts of Bengaluru frequently sit outside the corporation's and the development authority's areas, and their approvals come instead from the metropolitan region authority or from a local planning authority working under it. That is why BMRDA approved appears so often on layout advertising in the corridor.

Two cautions. First, like every planning approval, it is not a RERA registration and does not answer any of the questions RERA registration answers. Second, and specific to this corridor: the region it covers is a Karnataka region defined by Karnataka statute. Land across the border in Krishnagiri district, Tamil Nadu, is outside it entirely, and a Tamil Nadu layout cannot hold a BMRDA approval however Bengaluru-facing its buyers are.

The composition of the region and the allocation of functions between the region authority, local planning authorities and other bodies are set by statute and notification and have been amended.

The absence of a statutory definition is the point of this entry. The Act defines carpet area and builds its disclosure regime on that; built-up area is left to convention, and convention is not uniform. Most sellers mean carpet area plus the area occupied by the walls, plus the balcony. Some include a proportion of an adjoining terrace. Local building bye-laws and municipal assessment rules may use plinth area or built-up area with their own defined meanings for their own purposes, which need not match the meaning used in a sales document.

That variability is manageable so long as it is acknowledged. A built-up figure is useful for understanding the physical envelope of a home; it is unreliable for comparing two homes from two sellers, because the two figures may not have been arrived at the same way.

This is the only one of the three area figures you will be quoted that has a statutory definition, and the definition is unusually specific about its edges. Internal partition walls are in. External walls are out. Service shafts are out. An exclusive balcony, verandah or open terrace is out of carpet area — it is a separate figure, not folded into this one.

The definition exists because the same apartment used to be described by whatever area figure suited the seller. Fixing carpet area in the Act gives a buyer one number that means the same thing across promoters, and it is the number on which a registered project's disclosures and its agreement for sale are framed.

The practical use is comparison. Two apartments quoted at the same total price with the same super built-up area can differ materially in carpet area, and the carpet figure is the one that describes the home you will live in. Ask for it in writing, ask for the balcony and terrace areas separately, and compare those numbers rather than the headline.

The certificate is the point at which an approved drawing becomes a permitted building. It is issued by the local or planning authority with jurisdiction, and it is tied to the sanctioned plan — permission to build what was approved, not permission to build.

The acronym is ambiguous and the ambiguity causes real confusion. CC is used for commencement certificate at the start of a project and for completion certificate at the end, and the two are opposite ends of the process. The completion certificate, also defined in the Act, is issued by the competent authority certifying that the project has been developed according to the sanctioned plan, layout plan and specifications as approved. When someone says a project has CC, establish which one they mean.

For a plot buyer the certificate matters later and personally: when you build your own house on the plot, the plan sanction and the commencement certificate for that house are yours to obtain from the local authority, not something inherited from the layout's approvals.

Karnataka has been moving khata issuance onto online systems, so that the extract and certificate are generated from a digital record keyed to the property rather than typed out from a ledger. The stated aims are the ordinary ones for record digitisation: a single verifiable record per property, fewer duplicate and forged extracts, and a record that can be checked without visiting the office that holds it.

Everything about the rollout is exactly the kind of fact this page will not assert. Which properties are eligible, which documents the system requires, whether a digital khata is currently a prerequisite for registering a sale, how the system treats a property currently in the B-register, and which local bodies have gone live — all of these have changed during the rollout and have differed between Bengaluru's corporation and other local bodies. Any description of the process, this one included, should be treated as out of date until the issuing body confirms otherwise.

The one durable point is the one that also applies to a paper khata: an e-Khata is a municipal record. It is generated from what the body holds, so it inherits whatever is already in the record, correct or not. A clean-looking digital extract is not an independent verification of title.

The instalment is arithmetic, and the arithmetic does not change: EMI = P × r × (1 + r)ⁿ ÷ ((1 + r)ⁿ − 1), where P is the principal, r is the interest rate expressed per month, and n is the number of months. Everything a lender quotes you follows from those three inputs.

Two consequences are worth internalising before comparing offers. A longer tenure lowers the instalment and raises the total interest paid, often by a great deal. And because early instalments are mostly interest, prepaying early reduces total interest far more than prepaying the same amount late.

This page quotes no interest rate. Rates are set by lenders, move with policy and market conditions, and differ between borrowers on the same day. The formula is stable; the inputs are not.

The certificate is a search result, not an opinion. You ask the sub-registrar's office for a stated property over a stated span of years; it returns the entries the register holds — sales, mortgages, gifts, releases, partitions, court attachments where these were registered. In Karnataka the certificate is issued showing the transactions found, or, where the search returns nothing for that property and period, recording a nil result.

Its value is entirely a function of what you asked for. A search over a short recent period tells you very little, because the defect you are worried about may be older than the window. A search against an incorrectly described property returns a clean result for a property that is not the one you are buying. Both of those produce a genuine certificate that answers the wrong question, which is why the certificate is a step in a title investigation rather than a substitute for one.

The limits are worth stating in full, because a clean EC is routinely presented as though it settled everything. It does not cover documents that were never registered. It does not cover unpaid property tax, unpaid maintenance or utility dues. It does not cover litigation unless something was registered against the property in consequence. And it does not verify that the seller has the capacity to sell.

A ratio of 1.0 means the permitted floor area equals the plot area; 2.0 means twice the plot area, whether that is delivered as two full floors or spread differently within the setback and height rules. It is the single control that most determines how much can be built on a site, which is why it is the number developers watch and the number layout marketing rarely mentions.

The permissible ratio varies by land use zone, by the width of the abutting road, by the size of the plot, by the planning authority whose regulations apply, and it can be modified by the applicable master plan or bye-laws — including through premium or incentive provisions where those exist. Some jurisdictions distinguish FAR from FSI in their drafting; many use the terms interchangeably.

Alongside the ratio sit the setback rules, the height limits and the coverage limits. Together those, and not the ratio alone, determine the building that can actually be sanctioned on a plot.

Projects are assessed against criteria covering matters such as site planning, water efficiency, energy performance, materials and indoor environmental quality, and rated at levels within the relevant system. Participation is by choice, and a rating is a claim about the assessment a project has actually undergone.

Three statements about a project are routinely written as though they were the same one, and they are not. Pre-certified means IGBC has assessed the design and issued a pre-certification — a design-stage assessment, ahead of the final certificate awarded on completion. Certified means the completed project holds that final rating. Designed to IGBC guidelines, or aligned with them, means the design followed the criteria but IGBC has assessed nothing; it is not a certification and must not be described as one.

The distinction is worth policing because the strongest of the three claims is the easiest to make casually. A project that says rated when it holds a pre-certification, or that says certified when it holds neither, has made an unbacked third-party claim.

K-RERA maintains the public register for Karnataka projects and publishes it at rera.karnataka.gov.in. A Karnataka registration number searched there returns the project, the promoter as named on the certificate, and the filings made against the registration.

The promoter name on the register is the registered legal entity, which is frequently not the brand a project is marketed under. Where the two differ, the register is the one that governs, and a mismatch between a listing portal and the register is a fact about the portal.

Karnataka's rules under the Act, its registration process and its fees are made by the state government, so they are not interchangeable with any other state's — including the neighbouring one.

After a registered sale, two records exist and only one of them has been updated. The sub-registrar's records show the transfer. The municipal register still shows the seller, and will keep showing the seller until an application is made to change it. Closing that gap is the khata transfer, and it is the buyer's job, not something that happens automatically on registration.

Two related operations use the same machinery. Bifurcation splits one khata into more than one where a property has been divided; amalgamation merges several into one. Both are worth knowing about because a plot sold out of a larger holding may not yet have a khata of its own — what exists is a share of the parent's.

The application is made to the local body with the registered deed, the tax paid receipts and the identifiers the body requires, and a fee is payable. We are not printing the fee. It is fixed by the local body under its current notification, is generally computed from the value on which stamp duty was paid rather than being a flat sum, and has been revised; a number here would be wrong at some point after publication and would stay wrong.

A lower ratio means more of the price is funded by the buyer up front. The ratio is applied to the lender's own assessed value of the property, which is not automatically the price agreed with the seller — where the assessment comes in lower, the buyer's contribution rises even though the loan percentage has not moved.

The maximum ratio is a regulatory ceiling rather than an offer: within the ceiling, each lender applies its own credit policy, and the ratio actually sanctioned depends on income, existing obligations, the property and the loan size. No figure is printed here, because the ceilings are set in RBI directions and circulars and are revised.

The base also matters. Lenders generally compute the ratio on the property value, so stamp duty, registration charges and other transaction costs typically fall outside the funded amount and have to be found separately. Ask which costs a quoted ratio does and does not include.

The certificate is the authority's confirmation that the building as constructed may be lived in. It is issued at the end of construction, by the body that sanctioned the plan, and it is distinct from the completion certificate, which certifies that the project was developed according to the sanctioned plan and specifications.

The consequences of taking possession without one are not theoretical. Utility connections, resale, lending against the property and the position of the owners' association can all be affected, and the owner who moved in is the one holding the problem, not the promoter who handed over. This is why an occupancy certificate is a thing to ask for before handover rather than a formality to chase afterwards.

Under the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 the promoter's handover obligations — executing the registered conveyance and handing over physical possession and the common areas to the association of allottees — are tied to obtaining the completion or occupancy certificate. Handover ahead of the certificate is out of sequence.

The word is used loosely for several different events, and the differences have consequences. Physical possession is the handing over of the unit. Legal possession follows the registered conveyance. Offer of possession is the promoter's notice that the unit is ready and that possession should be taken; deemed possession is a contractual construct under which the buyer is treated as having taken possession after a stated period from that offer, whether or not they actually did. A buyer can be paying maintenance from a date on which they never held a key.

For a registered project, the agreement for sale is required to state the date by which possession is to be handed over, and the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 ties the promoter's handover obligations to obtaining the completion or occupancy certificate and to executing the registered conveyance in the buyer's favour, along with conveying the undivided proportionate title in the common areas to the association of allottees.

For a plot the meaning is narrower and cleaner. Possession is of the developed plot itself. What is handed over is land within a layout, with the layout's infrastructure; the house is a separate project you undertake afterwards, with its own sanction, its own certificates and its own timeline.

Registering a sale of immovable property is compulsory: the Transfer of Property Act, 1882 requires the transfer to be made by a registered instrument, and the Registration Act, 1908 requires documents creating or transferring rights in immovable property above a trivial value to be registered. The fee is what the state charges for performing that registration and entering the transaction in its records.

Two costs get conflated into one figure in conversation. Stamp duty is a tax on the instrument; the registration fee is a charge for the registration service. They are computed separately, may use different bases, and are set under different provisions. Ancillary charges — a cess, a scanning or user charge, a service fee at the point of filing — may also apply.

As with stamp duty, this page names the charge and does not quote it. The rate is set by state rules and notification and is revised.

The Act does three things a buyer can use. It makes registration a precondition of marketing and selling, so an unregistered project is being sold in breach of section 3. It forces disclosure — the registered particulars, the sanctioned plans, the promoter's details and periodic progress filings sit on a public register that anyone can search. And it creates a forum: complaints go to the state authority and appeals to a real estate appellate tribunal, rather than to the ordinary civil courts as a first stop.

Two structural points get confused constantly. First, the Act is central but implementation is state-level: each state establishes its own authority and makes its own rules, so registration numbers, portals, forms and timelines differ across a state border even though the Act does not. Second, RERA registration is not the same thing as a planning approval. Registering a project with the authority and getting a layout or building plan sanctioned by the competent planning authority are separate acts under separate laws, and a project can hold one without the other.

Section 3 also carves out small projects from registration by reference to the land area and the number of apartments, and expressly allows a state government to lower that threshold. Whether a particular small project needed to register is therefore a question about that state's rules on that date, not a question with one national answer.

Section 13(1) provides that a promoter shall not accept a sum more than ten per cent of the cost of the apartment, plot or building as an advance payment or application fee without first entering into a written agreement for sale and registering it. That is a figure written into the primary Act, which is why it is quoted here.

The Transfer of Property Act, 1882 defines sale as a transfer of ownership in exchange for a price, and requires that for immovable property above a trivial value the transfer be made by a registered instrument. That instrument is the sale deed. It identifies the parties, describes the property by its survey or site identifiers and boundaries, records the consideration, and recites how the seller came to own what is being sold.

Registration is the step that makes it operative against the world, and it happens at the office of the sub-registrar having jurisdiction over where the property lies — which is a point worth holding on to when the property is in one state and the buyer lives in another. Stamp duty is paid on the instrument before it is registered, and the registration fee is paid to register it.

For a project apartment there is a further deed to know about. When a promoter hands over, the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 requires a registered conveyance deed in the allottee's favour, along with the undivided proportionate title in the common areas to the association of allottees. The apartment's own deed and the conveyance of the common areas to the association are separate events, and the second one is the one most often left undone.

The duty is a tax on the document, not on the transaction, and the state where the property lies is the one that levies it. In Karnataka the governing statute is the Karnataka Stamp Act, 1957; a property in Tamil Nadu is governed by the stamp law applicable in that state. Two properties an hour apart on either side of the border are therefore assessed under different legislation.

The base is generally the higher of the consideration recorded in the instrument and the value published by the state's stamps and registration department for that locality — the guidance value, market value guideline or ready reckoner, depending on the state's terminology. Because that published value is revised periodically, the same transaction can attract different duty depending on when it is executed. Additional components such as cess or surcharge may apply on top of the headline rate.

We deliberately publish no percentage. The rate, the components, any concession and the published value are all set by state notification, all of them have been revised, and a figure written here would eventually be repeated somewhere with our name attached long after it stopped being true. Naming the concept and the source is the only version of this entry that stays correct.

The figure exists because the cost of the shared parts of a building has to be recovered somewhere, and distributing it across apartments as added area is the convention the Indian market settled on. Nothing in that is improper in itself. The difficulty is that the size of the addition is decided by the seller, and which common areas are counted into it is decided by the seller as well.

So a loading factor cannot be compared meaningfully across projects without knowing what went into each. A project that counts only circulation space and one that also counts a clubhouse, a pool deck and a parking structure will produce different numbers for buildings that are physically similar. There is no authority that fixes the figure, and no standard list of what belongs in it.

Because carpet area is defined by statute and this is not, the two are not alternative descriptions of the same thing. Carpet area describes your home. Super built-up area describes a pricing basis.

Its register is published on the official Tamil Nadu portal at rera.tn.gov.in, and a TNRERA number is searched there. The Karnataka portal holds no record of Tamil Nadu registrations, so searching a TNRERA number on it returns nothing — which looks alarming and means only that the search was run against the wrong register.

This matters on the Bengaluru–Hosur corridor more than almost anywhere else in India. Land a short drive from Sarjapur can sit in Krishnagiri district, Tamil Nadu, be sold largely to Bengaluru buyers, carry a Hosur postal address, and still be governed end to end by Tamil Nadu law: TNRERA for registration, Tamil Nadu's planning authorities for layout approval, Tamil Nadu's revenue records for the land, and the Tamil Nadu sub-registrar for the deed.

Describing such a project as K-RERA registered or as holding a Karnataka planning approval is not shorthand — it is a false statement about a statutory registration.

The land under an apartment building cannot be split between the owners, so each owner takes an undivided fractional interest in the whole of it. That share is described in the sale deed, usually as a fraction or as an equivalent area, and it is what makes the owners collectively the owners of the land. Under the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 the land for a project falls within the defined common areas, and the Act requires the promoter, on handover, to convey the undivided proportionate title in the common areas to the association of allottees.

How the share is arrived at is where the variability sits. It is generally set in proportion to the apartment's area relative to the total, but the base used for that proportion, and the treatment of amenity structures and future development rights, are matters of the promoter's documentation rather than of a single statutory formula. Two projects can therefore express the share differently and both be accurate about what they are describing.

The share is not separately tradeable. You cannot sell your undivided share and keep the apartment, or the reverse — they move together, which is precisely what distinguishes owning an apartment from owning a plot.