Homebuyers who sit on a compensation claim too long, even one arising from a builder's delay, can still find themselves shut out by a limitation clock that started running years before they filed. The Tamil Nadu Real Estate Appellate Tribunal said exactly that on 14 October 2026, dismissing an appeal by the Five Mount Villa Owners Welfare Association against Bahri Estates Private Limited and another respondent, and upholding the rejection of the association's compensation claim as time-barred.
The appeal turned on a question that comes up often under the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016 but has no answer written directly into the statute: when does the limitation period for a compensation claim actually begin, on the date the promoter was supposed to hand over possession under the agreement, or only once possession is actually, belatedly, handed over. Homebuyers understandably prefer the second answer, since it keeps their claim alive for as long as the delay continues. The tribunal, in this case, did not accept it.
Justice Duraiswamy and Judicial Member K. Babu applied Article 27 of the Limitation Act, 1963, which sets a three-year period for compensation claims arising from breach of a promise to perform an act at a specified time. Under that Article, the tribunal held, the clock starts when the specified time arrives, or when the contingency triggering the breach occurs, not whenever the breach is eventually made good. Applied to a builder's promise to deliver possession by a stated date in the agreement, that means the three-year period begins running from that promised completion date itself.
A natural objection follows: the promoters never delivered on time, so how could a claim over that very failure be stale before the failure was even cured by late possession. The tribunal's answer rested on a specific feature of the RERA scheme. Section 18(2) of the Act carves out an express exemption from limitation for compensation claims arising from defective title to land, recognising that a title defect may not surface for years and should not be time-barred simply because it was discovered late. The tribunal read that express carve-out as confirming, by its absence elsewhere, that no equivalent exemption exists for ordinary possession-delay compensation claims. If Parliament had meant to suspend limitation for every kind of RERA compensation claim until the underlying default was cured, it would not have needed to write a specific exemption for title defects alone.
That reading forecloses the argument that delayed possession itself keeps generating a fresh cause of action for as long as the delay continues. On the tribunal's view, the breach crystallises once, on the date performance was due, and the three-year clock starts then, regardless of whether the promoter eventually hands over the flat a year late or ten years late. A complainant who waits past that three-year window, whether because the delay was still ongoing, because settlement talks were underway, or simply because the claim was not filed promptly, risks losing the right to compensation even where the underlying delay by the promoter is not in dispute.
For homebuyers' associations and individual allottees pursuing RERA compensation in Tamil Nadu, and in other states where appellate tribunals take the same view of Article 27, the practical lesson is to treat the agreement's own completion date as the operative deadline for filing, not the date possession is finally received. Waiting for the project to actually finish before raising a compensation claim, a natural instinct when a buyer still hopes to get the flat and move on, can end up costing the buyer the claim itself if the gap between the promised date and the filing stretches past three years.
The tribunal's approach leaves RERA authorities and appellate tribunals applying a general civil limitation statute, rather than anything written into the real estate law itself, to decide when a homebuyer's compensation claim has gone stale. That is a narrower reading of RERA's protective scope than associations and allottees often assume going in, since the Act's promoter-registration and disclosure obligations run for as long as a project remains unregistered or incomplete, while the separate right to money compensation for a missed deadline, on this view, does not enjoy any comparable open-ended protection once Article 27's three years have run.