In 2006, Anjali Ghorpade booked a flat with Nishiland Construction in Vashi, Navi Mumbai. She was impressed by the advertisement in a newspaper that promised a high quality of construction and an array of furnishings. Last year, when she got possession of the flat, she was utterly disappointed. The flat actually fell far short of the dream home promised in the advertisement. Unfortunately, Ghorpade’s is not the only such case. In the absence of any regulation for misleading advertisements, buyers are routinely promising the moon and then delivering sub-standard houses.

In case of most of the products in the market today, you can see, touch and feel them, satisfy yourself about their features, read reviews, and in many cases, test-use them, and only then decide to purchase them. But in case of real-estate products, the situation is quite different. Here investors have very little to go by beyond the glossy advertisement, a site visit, and a tour of the sample flat (decorated with expensive furniture and fixtures, all shrewdly calculated to impress). With so little information, investors are expected to pay up money in advance for a product that will be delivered 12 months to two years later.

According to PSN Rao, founder-chairman of National Association of Realtors (NAR-India), “A home buyer visualises most of the things that he is going to get. Whether his dreams are going to become a reality depends more on his luck and the developer’s goodwill than anything else. A flat with a forest attached, a house with sky and stars above, and so on — these are not merely catchy lines in advertisements; they are downright misleading.” He adds that in the absence of any law on compulsory disclosure, advertisements tend to take customers for a ride. “Real estate is perhaps the most expensive one-time purchase that a buyer is going to make in his lifetime. The outcome of that purchase cannot be left solely to chance.”

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