The Maharashtra Real Estate Appellate Tribunal has told a Thane developer that a planning sanction obtained years after flats were sold cannot stand in for the buyers' own consent to a fresh building on the same plot. By an order dated 7 September 2026, the tribunal dismissed the promoter's appeal and partly allowed a cross-appeal filed by the project's housing society, in a dispute over an entire additional wing raised at the Parshvadhara project at Belavali in Ambernath taluka, Thane district.
Buyers at Parshvadhara booked their flats against a layout that did not show what later became Wing E. The promoter, M/s. Parshwanath Developers, obtained a revised sanction on 2 July 2021 permitting an additional building on the same plot, and went ahead and built it. The housing society, formed by the allottees once their flats were handed over, took the position that nobody who had already paid for a flat on the strength of the original layout had agreed to a new wing coming up alongside their homes, and that a later municipal approval did not change that.
The society first raised the grievance before the MahaRERA Authority, in Complaint No. CC006000000020890 of 2022. On 30 August 2024, the Authority held that the promoter needed the consent of two-thirds of the allottees before proceeding with the additional wing, and restrained further construction until that consent was secured. Both sides were dissatisfied. The promoter appealed, pointing to the revised sanction as its answer to the consent requirement. The society cross-appealed, arguing the Authority ought to have ordered the already-built wing removed rather than merely pausing further work on a structure that, by then, largely stood complete.
On appeal, the tribunal found the promoter's position collapsed a distinction that Section 7 of the Maharashtra Ownership Flats Act, read with the corresponding provisions of RERA, keeps separate. A revised layout approval from the planning authority answers one question: whether the promoter may lawfully construct the building at all. It says nothing about whether the people who already own flats in the project agreed to that construction coming up next to the homes they paid for. The tribunal held that this consent has to be specific to the particular additional structure and genuinely informed, and cannot be read out of a general clause in the sale agreement reserving the promoter's right to use additional floor space index. On the record before it, no such specific consent existed for Wing E, so the later sanction could not cure what was missing at the point the promoter chose to build.
Having rejected the promoter's defence, the tribunal went further than the Authority had. It ordered the promoter to demolish Wing E entirely, at its own cost, within ninety days, rather than simply freezing further construction. It also imposed a penalty of Rs 10 lakh on the promoter under the relevant provisions of RERA and MOFA, directed restoration of open spaces that the unauthorised building had taken up, required the promoter to complete conveyance of the project land and buildings to the society, and directed that thirty water connections promised to allottees be put in place within the same window.
Conveyance is not a side issue in a dispute like this. Until a cooperative housing society formed by allottees gets the land and buildings conveyed to it, the promoter retains a legal foothold to argue that decisions about the plot, including further construction, remain within its own discretion. By tying the demolition order to a conveyance direction in the same breath, the tribunal closed off that argument for any future addition on the same site.
The ruling matters beyond Parshvadhara because Maharashtra has no shortage of projects where a promoter secures a fresh sanction mid-way through a development and treats it as licence to add another tower, wing or floor. Societies facing that situation elsewhere in the state now have an appellate tribunal order that does not stop at restraining future work but orders an existing structure pulled down, on the footing that a government clearance obtained after the sale is not a substitute for the buyer's own say in what gets built around their home.