Scams in Real Estate You Should Be Aware of

The real estate sector is one of the most booming sectors of India. The majority population of India is involved in this sector directly or indirectly. Brokers, property dealers, property developers, professional service providers, realtors, consultants, investors, and of course clients work together in real estate. In the past 10 years, real estate has shown steady growth, unlike any other sector.

The government of India has been supportive of real estate in recent years. All these factors are responsible to make real estate a progressing sector which attracted many new enthusiastic people to enter real estate. But this also tempted many fraudulent and scamsters. These people have lured many people into their schemes and costing people their life savings.

Although in today’s age of information news spreads quickly so people are much informed than before but unfortunately people are likely to get influenced by deceiving promises by scamsters.

In this article, I have enlisted some precautions you can follow to be aware of this scam in real estate.

Before precautions to avoid scams, you must know what are scams and which real estate scams have occurred in India. Scamsters and frauds will falsely promise you things which they will not deliver to you and it will end up costing the customer a financial loss.

Till now many scams have occurred in India but to summarize I have categorized them into 7 types.

1. Title Fraud

The kind of fraud where the scammers get forged documents with their names as property owners to claim legal rights over the property.

2. Assured Returns Schemes

Scammers promise lucrative return offers to deceive individuals by promising extraordinary profits from a property investment, and to acquire their trust, they also provide some returns in the beginning to get more money released by the clients.

3. Unwarranted Delays

This is a rather common one. Customers are promised delivery of a property by a certain timeline but after the collection of money they start to face unwarranted delays because instead of completing the project he diverts money for his own needs costing a huge loss of time and money to investors.

4. False Promise

In real estate, there is an average of 7-8% return per annum is expected on a property but some developers for sake of money and scamming people will entice investors with attractive and some unbelievable offers. They will offer you a discount on the market rate for property and very less delivery period and after taking your money they will just leave the project.

5. Pre-Launch Projects

In this scam, the builder will offer properties at generous discount rates to raise funds before even getting approval. These properties will be sold without approvals and money will be diverted to buy land for higher returns.

6. Forced Cancellations

This is the most prevalent scam in India. The scammer will deliberately delay the construction of the project causing panic in investors so that at least some of the investors will take their money out. In this way, a scammer will have investors’ money by charging a cancellation policy.

7. Selling the same unit to Multiple investors

As clearly the name states, the builder sells one unit to many investors. Later investors have to fight for property claims where the builder is on run.

In Summary

Real estate investment consumes huge capital. For some it is even their entire life savings while some do it by taking huge loans from banks. Housing is a dream for all and scammers take advantage of this dream by thugging people of their dreams.

Scammers are only as smart as you let them be. A little awareness and guidance can help you outsmart all the scammers out there.

For awareness, you have The Real Talks. For guidance & support, you have Roodland India. Drop a mail at info@roodland.com