A homebuyer in Purva's One Park Avenue project on Ghodbunder Road, Thane, filed a complaint with MahaRERA well before his contractual possession deadline, betting that the deadline would be missed anyway. MahaRERA dismissed the complaint in 2021 as premature, reasoning that a complaint filed before the deadline had even arrived could not yet claim relief for delay. The buyer appealed, and the Maharashtra Real Estate Appellate Tribunal has now reversed that dismissal, ordering a refund of close to Rs 1.86 crore with interest.
The Tribunal's order, dated 9 October 2026, works out the refund precisely: Rs 1,85,99,612, less Rs 14,10,604 the buyer had already paid in taxes connected with the purchase, carrying interest at the State Bank of India's highest Marginal Cost of Funds based Lending Rate plus two percent, payable within thirty days. It also directed execution of a cancellation deed within forty-five days so the buyer can claim back the taxes paid to the authorities, and awarded Rs 25,000 in litigation costs.
Deducting the taxes from the refund rather than leaving the buyer to chase a separate refund from the tax authorities is a practical touch that matters more than its size suggests. Buyers who cancel a flat purchase often discover that recovering stamp duty or registration charges already paid is its own small ordeal, running on a different timeline and before a different authority than the one hearing the builder dispute. By tying the refund arithmetic to a cancellation deed executed within forty-five days, the Tribunal gave the buyer a single, time-bound mechanism to get both halves of his money back rather than two separate fights.
The timing point raised by MahaRERA's original dismissal is the one with the most reach beyond this one buyer. MahaRERA's original logic, that a complaint filed ahead of the possession deadline cannot complain of delay, treated the deadline as a fixed finishing line that had to be crossed before a grievance became ripe. The Tribunal did not accept that the proceedings had to freeze at the moment of filing. By the time the appeal came to be decided, the deadline had long passed and the flat was still undelivered, and the Tribunal held that later development could not be ignored simply because the complaint predated it.
Purva Oak, the company now running the project, tried a separate defence: it said it only took over the project later and should not answer for the earlier developer's broken promises. The Tribunal was not persuaded. MahaRERA had approved the transfer of the project to Purva Oak on 13 August 2024, and Section 15 of the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act fixes the consequence of that kind of approved transfer: the incoming promoter steps into the outgoing one's shoes and carries forward its contractual and statutory obligations, arrears included.
The Tribunal also dealt with the registered completion date, which the RERA records showed had been extended to 30 April 2027. Developers routinely point to such extensions as proof that no delay has occurred yet. The Tribunal read the extension differently: a registration extension changes what RERA's own records say about the project's timeline, but it does not rewrite or alter the separate contractual obligations the buyer and the original developer agreed to in the Agreement for Sale. Those obligations, and the possession date fixed in them, stood on their own.
Buyers facing a stalled handover after a project changed hands now have a concrete precedent to test against: liability for the old developer's delays travels with the project once MahaRERA has approved the handover, and a buyer does not lose the right to complain merely because their complaint arrived at the Tribunal's door earlier than the clock on their possession date had technically run out. For a sector where project transfers are becoming more common as stressed developers hand off half-finished towers to better-capitalised buyers, this is one of the clearer statements yet on where the old liabilities land once the paperwork changes hands.