What to check on a site visit, beyond the show flat

A show flat is a product demonstration. It is furnished by a stylist, lit deliberately, and often built at a slightly different scale from the flat you would buy. None of that is dishonest. It is just not the same thing as evidence.

The useful part of a site visit is everything around it. Here is what to look at, roughly in the order it is worth doing.

Before you go

Open the MahaRERA record for the phase you are being sold and download the sanctioned layout. Take it with you. Half the questions below answer themselves once you can compare what is drawn against what is being described.

Go on a weekday if you can. A Sunday visit tells you nothing about the road.

In the show flat

• Ask which unit this represents and whether the carpet area matches the one you would buy. Ask for both numbers.
• Check what is furniture and what is fitting. Wardrobes, false ceilings, light fixtures and kitchen counters are frequently staging rather than specification. The specification list in the agreement is the answer.
• Look for the beams and ducts. A show flat sometimes omits structural elements that will exist in the real unit.
• Open a window. Ask what will stand where you are looking, and check that against the layout you brought.

Outside the show flat

Stand on the actual plot

Ask to be taken to roughly where your tower will be, and to the floor level if the structure is up. Orientation, the neighbouring building line and what you will overlook are decided by position, and they are the things you cannot change later.

Look at the approach road, not the entrance gate

Entrances get landscaped. The road that carries you to it is the one you use twice a day. Check its width, its condition, and whether it is shared with construction traffic that will keep running for years.

Ask about water

Municipal supply or tankers, and how many hours a day. This is the single most common source of regret in Pune societies and the least likely thing to be volunteered.

Ask about power backup

Whether it covers the flat or only the common areas, and what it costs monthly. There is a large difference between a lift that works in a cut and a home that does.

Find the parking

How many spaces come with the flat, whether they are allotted or floating, and where they physically are. Basement levels look identical on a plan and very different at the bottom of a ramp.

The part almost nobody does

Visit a delivered project by the same builder, unaccompanied, and talk to somebody who lives there.

Three questions cover most of it:

1. When were you promised possession, and when did you get it?
2. What broke in the first two years, and how did the builder respond?
3. How did the handover to the residents’ association go?

Twenty minutes in an occupied society five years after handover will tell you more than any brochure, any rendering and any conversation in a sales lounge. It is also the only part of the process nobody is managing for you.

Before you pay anything

Get the cost sheet in writing, with every line itemised. Confirm the payment schedule is tied to construction stages rather than calendar dates. And remember that no more than ten per cent of the cost can be taken before a written agreement for sale is executed and registered.

A booking amount handed over on the day, in the lounge, on the strength of a discount that expires this evening, is the one decision people most often revisit.