A flat buyer in the Trendset Jayabheri Elevate project in Hyderabad complained to the Telangana Real Estate Regulatory Authority about two things: her occupancy certificate arrived late, and the clubhouse in the project did not match what had been sanctioned and disclosed when she bought her flat. The authority found against the promoter and imposed a penalty of Rs 27.5 lakh. Trendset Jayabheri Projects LLP and two associated landowners appealed to the Telangana Real Estate Appellate Tribunal, arguing the penalty was disproportionate to what they called a minor and cost-neutral construction variation.
The underlying facts, once laid out, made the promoter's characterisation harder to sustain. The clubhouse had originally been sanctioned and uploaded to the RERA website in 2017 as Ground plus two floors. The occupancy certificate the promoter eventually obtained, however, referred to a building permit showing Ground plus three upper floors, meaning an entire additional floor had been added to the amenities block at some point without the revised sanction ever being disclosed to allottees or uploaded to the regulatory portal as the law requires.
Two defences anchored the promoter's appeal. First, that the extra floor cost allottees nothing and was, in the scheme of a large residential project, a trivial deviation not worth a penalty of this size. Second, that the complaint was not maintainable at all, because an earlier compensation proceeding between the same parties had already dealt with related grievances, and allowing this complaint to proceed would amount to relitigating settled ground.
Neither defence survived scrutiny. On maintainability, the Tribunal found that the reliefs sought in the present complaint were distinct from whatever had been decided in the earlier compensation proceeding, so there was no bar to the buyer pursuing this separate grievance about the clubhouse and the revised plan. On the substance, it held that failing to upload the revised building plan to the RERA website was a gross violation of Section 11(3) of the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016, a provision that exists precisely so that buyers and the regulator can see what has actually been sanctioned for a project, not just what was disclosed at launch.
The size of the deviation mattered to the Tribunal's reasoning. An entire extra floor in the clubhouse is not a cosmetic change of the kind a promoter might reasonably treat as immaterial; it is new construction that required its own sanction and, under Section 14 of the Act, the consent of two-thirds of the allottees before the promoter could alter the sanctioned plan. No such consent had been obtained. The Tribunal held that this combination, an unsanctioned structural addition plus a failure to seek the statutorily mandated allottee consent, amounted to a clear violation of Section 14, and dismissed the promoter's argument that the change was too trivial to warrant the penalty imposed.
The ruling is a useful corrective for promoters who treat amenity-block changes as outside the scope of RERA's plan-disclosure and consent requirements, on the theory that clubhouses and common areas do not directly affect what a buyer paid for their own unit. The Tribunal's order makes clear that Section 11(3)'s disclosure obligation and Section 14's consent requirement apply to any deviation from the sanctioned plan, amenity areas included, and that a promoter cannot escape the consequences of skipping both simply by arguing after the fact that the change was harmless or inexpensive.
For allottees and resident welfare associations negotiating with promoters over undisclosed construction changes, the order also confirms that a prior compensation claim covering delay or possession issues does not exhaust a buyer's right to separately pursue a plan-deviation and consent violation, provided the reliefs sought are genuinely distinct. That keeps open a second avenue of enforcement even where an earlier RERA proceeding between the same parties has already run its course on different grounds.
The underlying timeline also explains why the buyer kept pursuing the matter rather than letting it rest once possession was handed over. Her flat's possession had been due well before the occupancy certificate eventually came through, and the gap between the promised date and the actual certificate gave her reason to scrutinise exactly what had been sanctioned for the project in the interim. It was that scrutiny, comparing the 2017 plan on the RERA website against what the occupancy certificate actually referred to, that surfaced the undisclosed extra floor in the first place, a reminder that allottees who check the regulator's own portal against the final occupancy documents can uncover deviations a promoter has not volunteered.