RERA at 10: The decade that rebuilt trust

When RERA came into effect a decade ago, the sceptics were not fully wrong to be sceptical. India had a long history of well-intentioned real estate legislations that dissolved quietly into non-enforcement. This one, however, was different. Not because this law was perfect, but because it arrived at the moment when the sector had run out of road on the old way of doing things.

A decade later, the results speak loudly.

And RERA’s significance runs far deeper than any single metric. It may be best understood not merely as a law that created paperwork, but as a system that changed market behaviour across three distinct dimensions: buyer confidence, capital discipline, and market formalisation. This is the lens through which its first decade deserves to be read.

What has changed

For most of the history of Indian residential real estate, the homebuyer was the most exposed person in the transaction. They paid the highest, had the least information, and had almost no recourse if things went downhill. This equation has been changed by RERA in ways that are now so normalised we sometimes forget they did not always exist: mandatory registration, defined carpet area, time-bound delivery, enforceable disclosures. Today, in several leading states, disposal rates have improved materially, though outcomes remain uneven across the country.

The bigger shift, though, is financial. The 70% escrow requirement, the provision that ring-fences homebuyer funds for that specific project and ties withdrawals to construction milestones, restructured how our real estate gets financed. Alongside the escrow framework, there has been a broader shift towards project-specific capital commitment— developer capital is now not portfolio-wide but project-specific. These rules have been altering the risk calculus for all the stakeholders including lenders, investors, and buyers. Moreover, they are a large part of why institutional capital is now more comfortable with India.

The numbers also support this. Capital deployment in Indian real estate hit a record $30.7 billion between 2024 and Q12026, an 88% jump from the preceding two-year period. That does not happen in a market that has not earned institutional trust.

The honest part

Any meaningful accounting of a reform of this magnitude remains incomplete without an honest assessment. So, saying that RERA has had a 100% success would be doing the reform a disservice.

A majority of state RERA authorities have either never published annual reports or stopped doing so. In several states, adjudication drags on well past the timelines the Act originally envisioned. Several orders get challenged and stalled. A lot of times penalties are modest or poorly enforced. Recovery takes longer than it should.

Recent judicial remarks have again highlighted the distance between adjudication and enforcement, with certain state authorities appearing to shield defaulting builders rather than protect homebuyers. This goes to the heart of what RERA was designed for.

The gap between a favourable RERA order and actually getting your money or your flat is, in many parts of the country, still wide. That is the central unfinished business of the first decade.

What the second decade needs to look like

Now that the framework exists, the question is whether we treat RERA as a compliance exercise or as a living system that needs to be continuously strengthened.

A few things matter most. First, enforcement must become consistent. It should not be limited to only the metro markets where institutional attention is highest, but across every state. The vacancies in tribunals need to be filled, technical capacity must be built, and recovery mechanisms be given more teeth.

Second, the data layer needs to catch up with the Act. Fintech-enabled escrow management, API-based fund tracking, and automated milestone disbursals can make the system more transparent at scale.

And third, the framework needs to grow with the market. The next wave of real estate investment is heading towards co-living, rental housing, fractional ownership, and SM REIT-linked assets. It would be a smart move to get these asset classes inside a robust regulatory perimeter early.

What comes next

RERA’s real legacy is not the project registration numbers or the complaint disposal rates, although both of these numbers matter. It is the quieter change in how this sector now thinks about itself. Developers now build with accountability as a baseline. Lenders extend credit with greater comfort. And buyers now approach the market with legal standing they never previously had.

India is witnessing the payoff of a decade of structural reforms, where each regulatory intervention like RERA, GST, the IBC, the RBI’s Project Finance Directions, has made the market more transparent, resilient, and institutionally credible. The compounding effect is real, and it is increasingly visible to global capital.

RERA’s first decade built the architecture of trust; its second must prove that trust is not merely documented, but deliverable.

(The author is Chairman & CEO – India, South-East Asia, Middle East & Africa, CBRE. Views are personal.)