Before the brochure, before the drive out, before anyone discusses price, there are four documents that tell you whether a plot in the Ghats is worth your Saturday. They are not exotic and they are not hard to obtain, and any seller who cannot produce them within a day or two is telling you something, which is usually the exact thing you needed to know. The purpose of asking for them early is not suspicion; it is efficiency. Four documents, read at the start, save you from spending weekends, deposits and legal fees on a plot that was never going to work.
One: the 7/12 extract
The 7/12 extract is the Maharashtra land record, and it is where every purchase should begin. It names the owner, the survey or gat number, the area of the plot, and any loan or charge registered against it. Pull it yourself rather than accepting a copy, so you know it is current, because the record changes and a copy handed to you reflects whatever moment the seller chose to print it. The name on it must match the name of the person who will sign your agreement, and if it does not, you need a documented explanation rather than a plausible one offered in conversation. The extract is the fastest and cheapest of the four to obtain, which is why it comes first. In ten minutes and for a nominal fee it answers the most basic question of all, whether the seller actually owns what they are selling, and it flags the encumbrances and the tenure restrictions that can end a transaction before it starts. It is not a complete answer on its own, but it is the natural first filter, and a plot that fails it fails cheaply and early.
Two: the NA order
Most land outside municipal limits is recorded as agricultural, and building on it legally requires the collector to convert its use to non-agricultural. The NA order is the numbered, dated instrument that records that conversion, and it carries conditions: a time limit within which construction must begin, charges, and setbacks or coverage tied to a sanctioned layout. Read the conditions on the second page rather than the reassuring heading on the first, and check that the survey number on the order matches the extract exactly. The order matters beyond the abstract question of legality, because it governs whether the property can be financed, resold and lawfully occupied. A house on land still recorded as agricultural cannot be mortgaged, is far harder to sell, and cannot obtain an occupancy certificate in the normal way. The NA order is therefore the second document precisely because it determines whether the plot can ever become a normal, financeable, saleable house, and a plot without a clean one is a very different proposition from a plot with it.
Three: the title search report
Three of these four documents are handed to you by the seller. The one that protects you is the one you pay for yourself. The title search report is the one you commission rather than the one you are handed, and it is the most important of the four for exactly that reason. Your own lawyer traces the ownership back the standard thirty years, checks for encumbrances, and reports on whether the chain of transfers is clean and the seller's title is marketable. It is the most expensive of the four and the only one that will reliably find a family dispute, an unregistered agreement or a defective inheritance that the revenue record has not caught up with, because those are precisely the problems that do not appear in the documents a seller can hand over. The temptation, every time, is to economise on this one, because it costs real money and the other three seemed reassuring. That temptation is the single most expensive instinct in the whole process. The seller's documents tell you what the seller knows and is willing to show; the title search tells you what a trained, independent examiner can find, and the gap between those two is where the catastrophes live. A title search is a small fraction of one per cent of the purchase price, and it is the one line of the whole transaction that can prevent a total loss.
Four: the sanctioned plan
The sanctioned plan is the approved layout and building plans, stamped by whichever authority has jurisdiction, which in the Ghats is usually the collector, the gram panchayat or the town planning department depending on the location and the size of the project. Check that what is drawn matches what is being sold to you: the setbacks, the coverage, the number of floors, the footprint. A house built outside its sanctioned plan is difficult to regularise, difficult to finance and difficult to sell, and the mismatch between what was approved and what was built is a recurring source of trouble. The plan also has to reconcile with the other three documents on the identity of the land, which is the recurring theme of all four. The survey or gat number on the plan must match the extract and the NA order, because a plan drawn for one parcel does not cover a house standing on a different one. Reading the plan is partly about the building and partly about confirming that all four documents are describing the same piece of ground.
The two that follow
Once construction is underway, two more documents matter, and they bracket the build. The commencement certificate confirms that work was legally started, issued by the sanctioning authority before construction began, and it is the document that separates a lawful building from an unauthorised one. On an under-construction purchase, the commencement certificate is the one that should already exist, because a project being sold before it has been granted is being sold on the expectation of an approval rather than the fact of one. The occupancy certificate confirms that what was finished matches what was approved and that the building is fit to occupy, and it is usually needed for permanent utility connections and for a bank to lend fully against a completed house. Under construction, the occupancy certificate will not yet exist, which is entirely normal; what is not normal is a completed house without one. These two are not among the first four you ask for, but they are the ones that complete the picture as a project moves from land to building to finished house.
The red flags in the paperwork
Certain patterns in the documents are worth treating as warnings rather than as details to be smoothed over, because they recur in the transactions that go wrong. A name on the extract that differs from the name of the person signing, without a clean, documented explanation. A survey or gat number that does not match across the four documents, which points either to a botched subdivision or to papers describing different parcels. An NA order whose conditions have not been met, or whose time limit has passed. A sanctioned plan that does not match the house actually built, with extra rooms, enclosed terraces or coverage beyond what was approved. An encumbrance on the extract that the seller is vague about discharging. None of these is automatically fatal, and each can sometimes be explained, but each should be treated as a question that must be answered in writing before you proceed rather than a wrinkle to be trusted away. The common thread is a mismatch between what the documents say and what you are being told, and mismatches of that kind are the raw material of most title disputes. A buyer who insists that every discrepancy be resolved on paper before committing is a buyer who catches the problem while it is still cheap to walk away from.
Why a checklist beats a feeling
There is a temptation, especially when a plot is beautiful and a seller is charming, to let a good impression stand in for the documentary checks. This is the single most reliable way to buy a problem. A view does not confirm a title. A confident, likeable seller does not confirm that the conversion is valid or the plan was followed. The documents are the only things that confirm those, and they do so regardless of how the visit felt, which is precisely their value. The discipline of working through the four documents as a checklist, in order, and refusing to advance until each is satisfied, is what protects a buyer from their own enthusiasm. It is unglamorous and it slows things down, and both of those are features rather than bugs, because the pace of a careful check is the pace at which problems have time to surface. The best purchases in this market are made by buyers who fell in love with a plot and then made themselves complete the checklist anyway, and who were willing to walk away if the paper did not support the feeling.
The order to read them in
Read them in the order above, because each one makes sense of the next and the sequence is a logic rather than a list. The extract tells you who owns the land and whether it is encumbered. The NA order tells you whether it may be built on. The title search tells you whether the ownership is genuinely clean beneath the record. The sanctioned plan tells you whether what is proposed or built is what was approved. Reading them out of order, or reading one and stopping, leaves gaps that the later documents were meant to close. The sequence also builds naturally from cheap and fast to expensive and slow, which is efficient. The extract and the NA order are quick and inexpensive and filter out the obvious problems; the title search is the significant spend, worth making only once the cheaper checks have not already disqualified the plot; the sanctioned plan confirms the building against the approvals. Following the order means you spend the least money on the plots most likely to fail and reserve the real expense for the ones that have already passed the quick tests.
Keep the whole set together
A small habit pays off through the entire life of ownership, not just at purchase: keep the four documents, and the two that follow, together in one place from the day you first receive them. Title, the 7/12 extract, the NA order, the sanctioned plan, the commencement certificate and the occupancy certificate form the legal spine of the house, and you will need them again for financing, for insurance, for utility connections and, eventually, for resale. Assembling them once, at purchase, and keeping them as a set saves you from reconstructing the file under pressure later. The set is also what your eventual buyer's lawyer will ask for, and a seller who can hand over a complete, well-organised bundle sells faster and at a better price than one who has to chase down a lapsed copy of the NA order years after the fact. Treating the documents as a permanent record to be maintained rather than as paperwork to be filed and forgotten is a small discipline that quietly protects the value of the house across every future transaction it will be part of.
What the speed of delivery tells you
There is a second, quieter piece of information in how the four documents arrive, quite apart from what they contain. If they arrive quickly, complete, and in agreement with one another, you are dealing with a seller who has done the work and has nothing they would rather you did not see. If they arrive slowly, in fragments, with explanations attached to the gaps and reasons why one or another is not quite available yet, that is itself the answer, and it cost you nothing but the asking to find out. A serious seller treats the document set as the natural opening of a real transaction rather than as something to be extracted reluctantly at the end of a negotiation. Every house in the Eko Estates portfolio has its title documents, 7/12 extracts, NA orders and sanctioned plans available for inspection, and the draft agreement goes out at the first serious conversation. We would rather a buyer read them early than late, because the documents are cheapest to check before a deposit and most painful to discover after one. Ask for all four before you visit, read them in order, pay for the title search yourself, and let the speed and completeness of the answer tell you as much as the papers themselves.