A homebuyer had paid Rs 91 lakh — 65% of the price of a Rs 1.4-crore flat — in a Karnataka project that was already running on borrowed time.Its RERA registration was due to expire in October 2020. Nine months of Covid relief followed. Then came another year under Section 6 of the Real Estate (Regulation and Development) Act, 2016, which allows project deadlines to be extended in limited circumstances. After that, Karnataka RERA gave the project two further continuations under Section 7(3), which allows a regulator to keep a project alive, subject to conditions, instead of revoking its registration.By July 2024, the extra time had run out. The project still had no water supply, sewage-treatment plant or permanent electricity connection. The promoter didn’t seek another extension and the registration lapsed.The buyer’s Rs 91 lakh remained tied up in a property she could not legally occupy.She then had to file her own complaint for compensation. The promoter stopped appearing before the regulator. Karnataka RERA eventually awarded her Rs 26.2 lakh on August 15, 2025 — more than 13 months after the project had lapsed. The report does not say that her Rs 91 lakh was refunded, or that the compensation award itself had been paid.Why is this kind of asymmetry not surprising? A new review by the Forum for People’s Collective Efforts (FPCE), a national homebuyer group that was involved in the campaign for RERA, says it’s because regulation can be proactive when the builder needs more time, but reactive when the buyer needs protection.Using official orders, filings, inspection reports and portal records from seven states, FPCE looked at what happens after a builder misses the deadline that brought the buyer into the project in the first place.In the Karnataka project, the report says, “each extension bought the promoter time. None bought the homebuyer progress.”FPCE says that across the extension cases it examined, not one allottee submission was recorded before the decision to give the promoter more time. Builders could place affidavits, certificates and explanations before the authority.The buyer whose possession date was being pushed back didn’t necessarily get a recorded say.The same thing happens with compensation. Section 18 of RERA gives delayed buyers who stay in a project a right to interest on the amount they have paid. Yet FPCE says not one extension order across its seven-state evidence base simultaneously directed the builder to start paying it. “The right is on paper,” the report says. Buyers who eventually received compensation had to pursue separate proceedings.Nor did an extension necessarily stop the builder from asking for still more money. FPCE found no order in its evidence base that checked whether construction-linked payment demands matched construction actually completed, or froze further demands where work had stalled. In one project, buyers had paid as much as 99-100% while certified construction stood at 55%.RERA was supposed to correct the old imbalance between a builder and a buyer. The report suggests that the old arrangement can keep resurfacing. “The post-RERA homebuyer,” the report says, “has rights on paper and a forum that grants extensions to the person violating those rights.”A building that goes from 94% complete to 76%, a project inspected only after it gets more time, a 28-month deadline stretched by eight years. Builders can get away with a lot. Read the full story here.