A homebuyer who paid half her flat's price without ever signing a Builder Buyer Agreement found out, on appeal, that the absence of that agreement was not the problem with her case. The Haryana Real Estate Appellate Tribunal has rejected her claim for delayed-possession charges on a narrower ground: the promoter had offered her possession before the contractual due date arrived.
Urmila Kumari Kadam had bought a unit in the Nimai Palace project from Y.B. Builders Pvt. Ltd. and Nimai Developers for a total consideration of Rs 67,37,923, of which she had paid Rs 50 lakh. No formal Builder Buyer Agreement was ever executed between the parties, which is often, by itself, a point of vulnerability for a promoter in RERA proceedings. Here it did not matter, because the Tribunal's decision turned on a different sequence of dates entirely.
Working from whatever documentation did exist, the due date for possession was calculated as 11 June 2023. The promoters had made their offer of possession on 1 April 2023, more than two months ahead of that due date. The project's paperwork showed an Occupation Certificate granted in principle on 10 February 2023, with the final Occupation Certificate following on 12 April 2023, just eleven days after the possession offer itself.
Kadam approached the Haryana Real Estate Regulatory Authority on 1 July 2025, and the Authority rejected her claim on 12 March 2026. On appeal, the Tribunal upheld that rejection, holding in terms that the promoters' offer of possession on 1 April 2023 constituted a valid offer because it preceded the 11 June due date, and that this fact alone defeated her entitlement to delayed-possession compensation. The bench of Justice Rajan Gupta and Technical Member Dinesh Singh Chauhan treated the timing relative to the due date as the decisive question, rather than treating the gap between the possession offer and the final Occupation Certificate as fatal.
That approach sits in some tension with an earlier Haryana RERA line of reasoning, reported in a 2024 ruling, which had held that a possession offer made before the Occupation Certificate is obtained is invalid. In Kadam's case, the promoters' 1 April offer came after the in-principle Occupation Certificate of 10 February but ahead of the final certificate dated 12 April. The Tribunal's order, as reported, does not appear to have treated that gap as disqualifying the offer, focusing instead on the offer's timing against the possession due date rather than against the final certificate.
For homebuyers and promoters alike, the ruling puts weight on a specific comparison: not whether possession was offered before a final Occupation Certificate issued, but whether it was offered before the due date fixed by the allotment terms. A promoter who can show an offer predating the due date, even without a signed agreement spelling out that date in black and white, stands a real chance of defeating a delay claim built on the gap between offer and final certificate.
Homebuyers pursuing similar claims would do well to scrutinise exactly how the due date itself was computed and documented, since that calculation, rather than the Occupation Certificate timeline on its own, appears to be what the Tribunal treated as controlling. Where no Builder Buyer Agreement exists, establishing the due date convincingly becomes the real battleground, not the sequence of certificates that followed. That absence of a signed agreement cuts both ways in practice. A buyer without a Builder Buyer Agreement often struggles to pin the promoter to a specific due date, which usually favours the buyer when the promoter cannot show any date at all and the delay stretches on for years. Here, though, the promoter still managed to establish 11 June 2023 as the operative due date through other allotment documentation, and once that date was fixed, the early possession offer did the rest of the work in defeating the claim. The order also illustrates how a two-year gap between an authority's rejection and the underlying events can complicate a homebuyer's case further. Kadam approached the Authority only in July 2025, well over two years after the 1 April 2023 possession offer, and the delay in bringing the claim gave the promoter ample documentation to rely on when the dispute was finally litigated. Buyers sitting on a possible delay claim would do well not to let that kind of gap open up, both to preserve evidence and to avoid arguments about delay in approaching the forum itself. Taken together with the Tribunal's willingness to treat the in-principle Occupation Certificate as part of the picture rather than irrelevant, the ruling suggests Haryana's appellate forum is prepared to look at the whole documentary trail around a possession offer, not just the single formal certificate that happened to follow it by a matter of days. Promoters defending similar claims elsewhere in Haryana should assemble that fuller trail, including in-principle approvals, correspondence and the actual offer letter, rather than resting their defence on the final Occupation Certificate date alone.