The RERA marketing mistakes developers keep making

Advertising before registration

The most straightforward breach is marketing a project that requires registration before it has been registered — including soft launches, pre-launch bookings and 'expression of interest' collections that are bookings in substance.

It is also among the easiest to evidence, because the advertising is public and dated. Developers take this risk under commercial pressure to start building a pipeline, and it is a poor trade: the exposure is real, and the pipeline built this way is at risk anyway if the registration is delayed.

Where pre-launch demand building is commercially necessary, the discipline is to build awareness and audience without offering, marketing or accepting bookings for units — and to take counsel's view on where that line sits for your specific activity rather than assuming.

Area quoted without carpet

Carpet area as defined under the Act is the basis on which units should be represented, and quoting super built-up or saleable area without the corresponding carpet figure is a persistent source of buyer complaints.

The practical operating rule we recommend is simple: carpet appears wherever area appears. On the price sheet, in the brochure, in the digital ad, in the channel partner's WhatsApp message, in the configuration table on the website. If a number describing size is shown, the carpet figure is next to it.

This is easy to enforce at the point of asset creation and very difficult to retrofit across dozens of live assets, which is why it belongs in the template rather than in a review checklist.

Renders showing what will not be built

A recurring and serious error is marketing imagery depicting amenities, landscaping, adjacent development or views that the sanctioned plans do not support.

Beyond the compliance exposure, this is commercially self-defeating. The buyer sees the actual site during the visit, and the discrepancy costs conversion at exactly the moment they were closest to transacting. At possession, it produces disputes evidenced entirely by the developer's own marketing.

The review question for every render is specific: is each element shown in the sanctioned plans, and is anything shown that is outside the developer's control — a neighbouring plot's open space, a view that depends on an adjacent site remaining undeveloped, a road that is not yet built.

• Every amenity shown present in the sanctioned plans
• No reliance on adjacent land the developer does not control
• Views depicted achievable from the specific units being sold
• Landscaping consistent with what will actually be planted
• Artistic impressions clearly labelled as such
• Infrastructure shown limited to what exists or is under construction

Possession dates stated more confidently than filed

Sales teams and channel partners routinely state possession timelines more confidently, and earlier, than the registered completion date. It converts well in the room and it is the single most common source of subsequent disputes.

This is a training and governance issue rather than a creative one. The registered date is the date; anything a salesperson says that improves on it is a representation the developer will be held to. Recording calls and auditing them against a published rubric catches it, and the channel partner briefing has to cover it explicitly because partners are outside the developer's direct supervision.

The fix is a pre-release review

Almost all of this is prevented by one process: no marketing asset is released without being checked against the project's own RERA filings and sanctioned plans, by someone whose job it is to do that check, with the check recorded.

It adds a day or two to asset production. It is not a legal opinion — the promoter's counsel provides that — but it catches the routine errors that counsel is rarely shown in time, and it creates a record that the developer exercised care.

We run this as a standing part of any marketing mandate, including on channel partner material and on assets the developer's own team produces, because the exposure attaches to the promoter regardless of who made the asset.